The Case for an Apple-Powered MacBook: The Case For A MacBook Pro Or M2 Pro Or The M2 Max Or MacBook Pro Based On The M1 Architecture
in 2020, Apple’s MacBooks entered a new era. The company announced it was moving away from the Intel chips it had been using since 2006, and rolled out the first Macs with the Apple-designed M1. The new MacBook Pro powered by the M2 Pro and M2 Max is one of the seven chips that the company now offers.
Just like Apple’s iPhones, the chips run on the ARM architecture and afford the company greater control over its hardware and software. These processors make Apple laptops both more powerful and power-efficient, meaning greatly improved performance and battery life. You get other perks, like the ability to run mobile apps originally made for iOS. Despite all these advancements, choosing a MacBook is still difficult. To us, this is what you should spend your hard-earned money on.
WIRED: The M2 Max is not the same as the M1 Pro, but the same kind of laptops. The difference between the M2 Pro and the MacBook Air
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The price of the MacBook Air is higher than it was for the predecessor due to the upgrade on the inside and out. The company officially ditched the signature wedge form factor for a boxier chassis. It has new colors in addition to the traditional gray and silver options. The display is also bigger and comes equipped with an updated webcam. The screen is thinner at 13.6 inches, it boasts 500 nits of brightness, and there is a camera with a resolution of 1920 x 1200.
The more significant difference between these two chips lies in GPU power. You can basically think of the M2 Max as the M2 Pro with some extra graphic chops.
I averaged close to 14 hours of nonstop use on the M2 Max model with my workload. I can’t guarantee everyone will get that amount of time, especially since my workload largely involves Chrome tabs, Google docs, and some streaming, but I do think most people will get more out of the M2 Max than they would out of the vast majority of 16-inch laptops on the market.
The difference in performance was not as striking in Xcode. The M2 Max finished the Xcode Benchmark three seconds faster than the M2 Pro. That’s a difference, sure, but it’s not nearly as wide as, say, the gap between the M2 Pro and the M1 Max. I don’t think the M2 Max should be a necessity for web design.
Both of the devices had the same 12-core CPUs and model numbers. These chips have the same architecture — so if you’re doing primarily CPU-heavy work during your day, you’ll get very little benefit from the Max over the Pro.
The M2 Pro was not quite as consistent. I exported the same video multiple times, and it shows a time from two and a half minutes to over six minutes. There was not a rhyme or reason for the different times that the process did not get consistently faster or slower. The graphics on the M2 Pro often got hung up on by the M2 Max, which made it difficult to navigate through them. Becca Farsace, our senior video producer, had the same experience exporting a different video file.