Apple this week expanded its lineup of Apple silicon chips with the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors, building on the M2 chip announced in June. The new lineup of M2 chips represents the second generation of Apple silicon that can now now be found in the latest Macs.
The M2 Pro and M2 Max are noteworthy upgrades over the M1 Pro and M1 Max, bringing more performance, battery life, and capabilities to professional users. Below, we've listed five of the most important details you need to know about Apple's latest Mac chips.
A Lot of Memory Bandwidth: The new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips feature the same memory bandwidth as their respective predecessor, which is some of the highest in the industry. Like the M1 Pro, the M2 Pro chip supports up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M2 Max supports 400GB/s of memory bandwidth like the M1 Max.
Even Longer Battery Life: The M1 Pro and M1 Max have two high-efficiency cores, whereas the M2 Pro and M2 Max both feature four efficiency cores, allowing the new Macs to tackle heavy workloads using less energy, thereby conserving battery life.
Tons More Transistors: Thanks to the use of second-generation 5nm process technology, the M2 Pro has 40 billion transistors, which is 20% more than the M1 Pro. With M2 Max, the jump is even bigger – its 67 billion transistors is 10 billion more than the number used in the M1 Max.
Highest Unified Memory Yet in a MacBook Pro: 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros configured with the high-end M2 Max processor now support up to 96GB of unified memory. The 96GB of memory option is an additional $800, on top of the $200 extra for the higher-end variant of the M2 Max chip.
Connect Even More Displays: 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and Mac mini models configured with M2 Pro support up to two external displays. M2 Pro supports two 6K displays over Thunderbolt, or one 6K display at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one 4K display at 144Hz over HDMI. MacBook Pro models with M2 Max support up to four displays: three displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one more 4K display at 144Hz over HDMI. M2 Max also supports two 6K displays at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one 8K display at 60Hz or one 4K display at 240Hz over HDMI.
The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro can be configured with both M2 Pro and M2 Max, while the updated Mac mini can be configured with either M2 or M2 Pro. Both the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini are available for pre-order on Apple's website and will begin arriving to customers on Tuesday, January 24.
Friday January 17, 2025 2:42 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 19 is still around six months away from being announced, but a new leak has allegedly revealed a completely redesigned Camera app.
Based on footage it obtained, YouTube channel Front Page Tech shared a video showing what the new Camera app will apparently look like, with the key change being translucent menus for camera controls. Overall, the design of these menus looks similar to...
Thursday January 16, 2025 6:45 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple today adjusted estimated trade-in values for select iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models in the U.S., according to its website.
Some values increased, while others decreased. The changes were not too significant, with most values rising or dropping by $5 to $50.
We have outlined some examples below:
Device
New Value
Old Value
iPhone 15 Pro Max
Up to $630
U ...
Sunday January 19, 2025 6:58 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple on late Saturday removed TikTok from the App Store in the U.S., and it has now explained why it was required to take this action.
Last year, the U.S. passed a law that required Chinese company ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok due to potential national security risks, or else the platform would be banned. That law went into effect today, and companies like Apple and Google...
Thursday January 16, 2025 12:39 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple provided the third beta of iOS 18.3 to developers today, and while the betas have so far been light on new features, the third beta makes some major changes to Notification Summaries and also tweaks a few other features.
Notification Summary Changes
Apple made multiple changes to Notification Summaries in response to complaints about inaccurate summaries of news headlines.
For...
Saturday January 18, 2025 10:28 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 19 will not drop support for any iPhone models, according to French website iPhoneSoft.fr.
The report cited a source who said iOS 19 will be compatible with any iPhone that can run iOS 18, which would mean the following models:
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Plus
iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 15
iPhone 15 Plus
iPhone 15 Pro
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 14
iPhon...
Friday January 17, 2025 3:38 pm PST by Juli Clover
For the last several months, we've been hearing rumors about a redesigned version of the iPhone 17 that Apple might call the iPhone 17 "Air," or something along those lines. It's going to replace the iPhone 17 Plus as Apple's fourth iPhone option, and it will be offered alongside the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
We know the iPhone 17 Air is going to be super slim, but...
Sunday January 19, 2025 6:02 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple plans to expand the iPhone's redesigned Mail app to the Mac starting with macOS 15.4, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
The first macOS 15.4 beta should be made available in the coming weeks, and Apple has previously suggested that the iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4 series of software updates will be released to the public in April.
The revamped Mail app debuted on all...
Sunday January 19, 2025 8:25 am PST by Joe Rossignol
In September, Apple said that it would be launching Powerbeats Pro 2 in 2025, and it appears the wireless earbuds are coming very soon.
Powerbeats Pro 2 images found in iOS 18 code
In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the Powerbeats Pro 2 are "due imminently." In addition to Apple filing the Powerbeats Pro 2 in regulatory databases last month, Gurman said Apple is...
The expanded display support throws up an interesting conundrum - it seems that the 8k60 (or 4k240) is only supported by the HDMI port and that the Thunderbolt interface is limited to 6k60. This means that to get the highest performance video output you can't have a one-cable solution (USB-C) and none of Apple's displays accept HDMI in (and don't seem to support >60 Hz)... Even a new Apple XDR display that supported 120 Hz would still need an HDMI cable. Does this imply that the ports are still DisplayPort 1.4? (the PC market is moving to DisplayPort 2.1 and plant of GPUs and monitors with support were announced at CES)
On battery life, does this mean maxing out the CPU will give less battery life than M1 Pro/Max as it seems that the increased battery life advertised arises from the low power cores being able to do a bigger proportion of low-mid level tasks?
HDMI 2.1 offers 48Gbps whereas Thunderbolt 4 is limited to 40 Gbps. You need 43 Gbps for 8K, 60Hz in 4.2.0. This means that the MacBook Pro's support for 8K is limited to 4.2.0 chroma subsampling: fine for watching movies, unsuitable for grading movies, OK for gaming but downright awful for displaying text at 1x the resolution, but probably alright at 2x retina. https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling
My guess is that next year's laptops will offer Thunderbolt 5, which offers 80Gbps and will allow full 4.4.4 chroma subsampling, and the next XDR display will be 8K and require Thunderbolt 5. Or maybe, Apple will put two Thunderbolt ports on that future XDR and allow 2022 MacBook Pros to output 4.4.4 to it using 2x Thunderbolt 4 connections. Similar to how the Dell UP3218K uses two Displayport connections (this monitor seems incompatible with the 2022 MacBook Pro and I've only read about one person using it with a Mac, using a Mac Pro 7.1, two PCIe graphics cards and a fair amount of hacking).
The expanded display support throws up an interesting conundrum - it seems that the 8k60 (or 4k240) is only supported by the HDMI port and that the Thunderbolt interface is limited to 6k60. This means that to get the highest performance video output you can't have a one-cable solution (USB-C) and none of Apple's displays accept HDMI in (and don't seem to support >60 Hz)... Even a new Apple XDR display that supported 120 Hz would still need an HDMI cable. Does this imply that the ports are still DisplayPort 1.4? (the PC market is moving to DisplayPort 2.1 and plant of GPUs and monitors with support were announced at CES)
On battery life, does this mean maxing out the CPU will give less battery life than M1 Pro/Max as it seems that the increased battery life advertised arises from the low power cores being able to do a bigger proportion of low-mid level tasks?
Can we expect a MacBook Pro redesign in 2024? I'm really not a fan of the bulky design and the all black keyboard. ?
I'm a fan of it. I think the design is great. I'm pretty sure it's ”bulky” (I think it's heavy, but not bulky) for a reason. If you want slim there's MacBook Air.
Another thing: Every upgrade extra is ridiculous expensive. You can upgrade your M2 chip with $1000's worth of extra cores, graphical cores of unified memory.
While benchmarks will be interesting to see compared to the M1 Pro & M1 Max, I've still got no regrets buying my 14" MBP with the M1 Pro back in July and not waiting for the M2-series.
Battery life already lasts longer than I need it to and I don't use high-refresh rate displays. And the machine is currently faster than I need anyway. So the M2 Pro isn't bringing anything else to the table.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy they're out, but Apple hardware is so good currently, I no longer need to upgrade constantly.
