First look: Apple’s new MacBook Pro packs a punch on the go

MacBook Pro M2 Pro (2023)

It’s a little later than we expected, but the new MacBook Pro has finally landed. Apple announced the updated 14- and 16-inch devices last week with a press release and a video presentation rather than a big launch event.

But that doesn’t make them any less notable. While there is little difference on the surface, there is a lot going on under the hood. The biggest change? The chips powering the devices, Apple’s newest M2 Pro and M2 Max. The new chips promise better performance than Apple’s M1 devices, and significant gains over the Intel-powered Macs, if you’ve been hanging on to your old device. The macBook Pro can now render effects at up to 6x faster and, at the top end of the scale, offers up to 96GB of unified memory for the most demanding of tasks.

The next generation of Apple’s chips stick with the 5-nanometre process but increase the number of efficiency cores and run faster than their predecessors. So while the M2 Max is the powerhouse, the M2 Pro, with its promised efficiency gains, is worth a second look – especially if you can’t afford to make the leap in price to the Max.

The review model supplied here is the 14-inch model with the M2 Pro, 32GB of RAM and 2TB storage. The chip has 12 cores – eight performance, four efficiency – and 19 GPU cores. That sets it a few notches above the entry level spec.

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If you want to do some power-intensive work – video rendering, image editing and so on – the M2 Pro chip will come into its own. There were no hiccups here. For the test, I ran some simple photo editing tasks, with a bit of video editing for good measure. There were no hiccups or noticeable slowdowns, and everything seemed to run just as quickly when multitasking as it did when the processes ran solo.

The improved efficiency of the M2 Pro chip has knock-on effects for battery life too. Apple says it will offer 22 hours of use, but that will vary depending on how much you are hammering the battery throughout the day. Try to do 22 hours of heavy load work, such as video editing or 3D rendering, and you might find the battery dwindles a bit quicker.

Swapping my regular laptop out for the MacBook Pro, the jump in battery life was noticeable. I got through a full day of work and finished a second with a quarter of the battery life left. That included writing and filing articles, recording audio, jumping into a few video calls, keeping up with internal messaging systems, checking email frequently and some Disney+ breaks to keep the smaller household members occupied for 10 minutes or so. Other laptops would have given up the ghost long before, so Apple has raised the bar here.

Don’t expect a new design. The MacBook Pro follows the same design as its predecessor, so there is very little difference to shout about. The Touchbar was ditched from the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBooks in 2021, and the M2 Pro MacBook does not add any new design elements.

Does it need to, though? Apple’s design is tried and tested. The 14-inch device feels compact yet usable – and crucially for this review at least, it is durable, with the metal casing standing up well to daily use without too many ill-effects.

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There is plenty of space on the screen for video and photo editing, or multitasking with documents and web browser windows. This 14-inch display is Apple’s Liquid Retina XDR technology, which is a proprietary Apple standard but basically means it looks great, with a high resolution and peak brightness that should deal well with any reflections and bright light – should we get those at some point in Ireland. Slimmed down bezels, while not quite as edge-to-edge as other laptops, give you more screen space in a smaller footprint.

One thing that also hasn’t changed: the notch remains. But truth be told, you rarely notice it. When watching streaming video on Netflix, Apple TV or Disney+, the video content comes with a black band across the top of the screen that obscures the notch, even in full-screen mode.

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You also get some powerful speakers with a six-speaker sound system that punches above its weight. Not only does it hit some decent volume, but Apple has put some power in there too so they don’t feel like tinny laptop speakers. There’s actual depth to the sound which makes using this laptop for streaming video a pleasure.

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Good:

The M2 Pro-powered MacBook handled everything we threw at it with ease.

Battery life is excellent, so you can confidently leave the house without a power cable for the day on a full charge.

The FaceTime camera is 1080p, which gives decent performance even in lower light, and there’s enough power in the MacBook Pro to run whatever virtual background you prefer to block out the chaos behind.

Bad:

The biggest competition for Apple is going to come from its own devices already on the market. The entry-level specs on the MacBook Pro M2 may struggle against the existing MacBook Air and last year’s M1-powered MacBook Pro. If you don’t need a sizeable power bump, you can save yourself a bit of money here by opting for the Air, which puts in a great performance, or last year’s M1 model, which is still a great machine.

Everything else:

The MacBook Pro comes with a braided white cable in the box. While I liked them on the desktops, braided cables are a dirt magnet and harder to clean – and will inevitably get grubby if you are carting them around with you. Yet another point in favour of the MacBook’s battery life.

The new machines are also future-proofed, supporting the new wifi 6E standard too, and advanced HDMI for 8K displays.

The verdict:

An early thumbs up for Apple’s new MacBook Pro.