Mac pro new release. Apple MacBook Pro (2023) Review: M2 Pro and M2 Max Flex

The 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros look the same, but have boosted performance.

Tom’s Hardware Verdict

The 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, with M2 Pro and M2 Max offer incredible power and long-lasting battery life. Add best-in-class speakers and gorgeous Mini-LED screens and you have some of the best laptops on the market, if you’re willing to pay for their high price tags.

Pros

• Powerful performance
• Long battery life
• Best speakers on a laptop
• Beautiful Mini-LED display
• Color matching MagSafe charger for Space Gray

Cons

• – Notch in display is distracting, with no facial recognition
• – RAM and SSD upgrades are very pricey

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Today’s best Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch M2 Pro (2023) 1TB and Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch M2 Pro (2023) 4TB deals

The 2021 redesign of the MacBook Pro supercharged the lineup, adding Apple Silicon, plenty of ports, a 1080p webcam and even made it thicker to accommodate it all. It was a bold move (and in some cases, a big reversal for Apple). Now, the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros maintain everything that was great about that design, but updates them to the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, adding more power and endurance than before.

These are still some of the best ultrabooks, with gorgeous Mini-LED displays, excellent speakers and functionality that feels worthy of professionals and hobbyist creators alike.

Upgrades to the highest-performance parts, including RAM and storage, will cost you a serious chunk of cash over the base models, but you should seriously consider them, because Apple’s design doesn’t allow for internal upgrades down the line. If you’re ever going to want 96GB of RAM with your M2 Max, consider emptying your bank account at the point of purchase.

With M2 Pro and M2 Max, the MacBook Pro is more powerful than ever, and is an alluring replacement for lots of aging.

MacBook Pro (2023) Design

The new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros have the exact same chassis as last year’s redesign. They still feel new and fresh, and they still allow for a solid port selection and plenty of power, so I’m OK with this decision. Both options have boxy sides combined with rounded corners to mix pro functionality with Apple sheen.

We tested the 14-inch MacBook Pro in silver and the 16-incher in space gray (which I prefer), but the colors aren’t that dissimilar. At least this year, the notebooks come with color-matched MagSafe power cables. Either size or color has Apple’s logo in a tone-on-tone mirror finish on the lid, but is otherwise minimalist.

Whether you have the 14.2-inch or 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, it’s going to have a notch in the top of it, similar to the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus (the 14 Pro line switched to a pill-shaped cutout last year). This allows Apple to fit a 1080p camera in there. Early last year, I bought a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, and, unlike with my iPhone, I have never stopped noticing the notch. That’s the case for me with this year’s Pros, as well as the M2 MacBook Air. The screens are actually taller than the usual 16:10, so you don’t lose any usable space versus previous models. But if you’re annoyed like I am, you might want to look into software fixes, like TopNotch, which make the menu bar black to help make the notch blend in. And yes, the mouse can still go underneath the notch, which seems like an oversight.

All of the other improvements from last year’s redesign, however, still feel great. There are full-sized function keys, Touch ID on the power button and plenty of ports.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros have the exact same ports. On the left side, there’s a MagSafe 3 charging port, a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The right side has an SDXC memory slot, a third Thunderbolt 4 port and the HDMI port. That HDMI port has been improved from the prior models, allowing 4K support at 240 hz or 8K at 60 Hz, as well as variable refresh rate. We didn’t have a 4K 240 Hz monitor to test with (those are pretty rare), but we’re curious to see how it holds up.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro measures 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.5 pounds, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 14.01 x 9.77 x 0.66 inches and, with the M2 Max, weighs 4.8 pounds. Comparatively, the popular Windows-based Dell XPS 15 (9520) is 13.56 x 9.06 x 0.73 inches and weighs 4.31 pounds.

MacBook Pro (2023) Specifications

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Pro (2023)

Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max are both powerhouses. And both MacBook Pro configurations we tested: a 14-inch Pro with an M2 Pro, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD and a 16-inch Pro with a whopping 96GB of unified memory and 4TB SSD both performed admirably in our testing.

The M2 Pro in our 14-inch review unit has 12 CPU cores. eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. The M2 Max has an identical CPU core setup to the Pro we reviewed. But the M2 Pro has a 19-core GPU, while the Max has a 38-core GPU. Both also include a 16-core Neural Engine and dedicated media engines for encoding and decoding in H.264 and HEVC or accelerating ProRes.

Both the Pro and the Max also have faster access to memory. Apple claims the updated architecture allows for 200 GB/s of bandwidth on M2 Pro and up to 400 GB/s on M2 Max.

Needless to say, both machines were overkill for my workload, which involves lots of web browsing for research, writing and photo editing, often with music and social media apps in the background and some light gaming (I still leave my intense gaming to PC and consoles.)

On Geekbench 5, the M2 Max-based laptop won with a single-core score of 1,993 and a multi-core score of 15,173, with the M2 Pro just a few points behind. It’s a nice jump over the M1 Max we tested back in 2021, as well as the Intel Core i7-12700H in the Dell XPS 15 (9520), though we haven’t seen what Intel’s 13th Gen Core mobile processors can do just yet.

The 14-inch laptop copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,917.69 MBps, tied with the previous-gen 16-incher. This year’s M2 Max-based 16-inch Pro came in at 1,789.85 MBps, which represents being one second behind. It should be noted that there have been reports that entry-level MacBook Pros are reportedly seeing worse SSD performance, Teardowns suggest Apple has used fewer NAND modules on those devices.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max made its strongest showing on Handbrake, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in 3 minutes and 59 seconds. That’s seven seconds ahead of the M2 Pro-based system (4:06) and well ahead of the M1 Max and the XPS 15.

On the Xcode Benchmark, which we’re using for the first time here, we found that the similar CPUs meant similar scores. The 14-inch MarBook Pro with M2 Pro took 85 seconds, while the 16-inch Mac with M2 Max completed the task in 83 seconds.

To stress test the systems, we ran each through 20 runs of Cinebench R23 multi-core. Because the laptops have the same CPU cores, it’s not surprising that they both shared scores in the mid to high 14,700’s. Both had some peaks and valleys as the chips cooled off, but they largely operated in a similar fashion. Notably, the 14-inch MacBook Pro’s fans started earlier and were louder to my ears than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which was far quieter until the eighteenth run, where I really noticed it.

During the stress test, I used TG Pro to track CPU core temperatures. (Apple doesn’t make clock speeds available to the software. For what its worth, Cinebench R23 lists estimates that the M2 Pro has a 3.2-GHz single-core clock, the M2 Max has a 3.4-GHz single-core clock, and both chips have 3.3 GHz multi-core clock speeds. Take that for what you will.) The M2 Pro’s CPU efficiency cores ran at an average of 94.44 degrees Celsius, while its performance cores measured 99.02 C. The M2 Max’s efficiency cores ran at 92.98 C and its performance cores averaged 97.62 C.

The M2 Max may have run cooler because it’s in the 16-inch chassis, with more room for heat and, likely, a larger cooling system.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The full-fat M2 Pro has a 19-core GPU, while the M2 Max gets 38 cores. For many creatives, those cores will be put to work in rendering, motion graphics, illustration or other artistic pursuits.

It won’t come as a huge surprise that we FOCUS a lot on gaming as a show of graphical prowess here at Tom’s Hardware. In Apple’s case, newer games are being built on the Metal 3 API, including MetalFX Upscaling to render scenes more quickly with temporal or spatial algorithms. and more games, especially those on Apple Arcade, are using Metal 3. The biggest example of a major game coming to Apple’s App Store with native support for Apple Silicon is Resident Evil Village.

I was eager to test the M2 Max’s 38-core GPU and 96GB of unified memory, so when I played Resident Evil Village, I set the resolution to 3456 x 2160 and set the graphics preset to max. The game typically ran between 50 and 60 frames per second (higher in daylight scenes with less action, less in darker scenes with more detail), though it did achieve a flat 60 fps a few times. With MetalFX upscaling set to quality mode, it often stayed at a locked 60 fps. Using these settings took up 12.54GB of RAM out of the 70GB or so that the game can reserve.

On the M2 Pro’s 19-core GPU and 16GB of RAM, I tried some more reasonable settings, using the prioritize graphics preset at 1080p. In a dark, haunting scene early in the game, the MacBook with the M2 Pro ran Village around 80 frames per second, but in the daylight scenes, where more details in the game’s namesake village and surrounding forests needed to be rendered, it ran between 60 and 70 fps. With MetalFX scaling, the game often jumped to the high 70s or even 80 fps in the same scenes.

In an attempt to try some more conventional settings, I set the resolution to 2560 x 1440 and chose the prioritize graphics preset. I was able to get over 100 fps in game play, and that’s before MetalFX upscaling.

There’s power on Apple Silicon for gaming, but more developers have to be on board. I would love to see more games on Metal, but Apple will need to do some serious developer relations to get more native development released.

That’s not to say the new Macs can’t game over the Rosetta instruction set. On the (admittedly old) Rise of the Tomb Raider, the M2 Pro reached 49 frames per second at 1920 x 1200, while the M2 Max reached 92 fps at the same resolution. The M2 Max even achieved a palatable 32 fps at 3456 x 2234.

Display on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The screens on both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are excellent. Apple labels them Liquid Retina XDR, which effectively translates to high resolution mini-LED panels with HDR support and adaptive refresh rates up to 120 Hz using Apple’s ProMotion technology.

The 14.2-inch laptop uses a 3024 x 1964 resolution screen, while the 16-inch notebook has a 3456 x 2234 resolution panel. Either way, the first episode of The Last of Us on HBO Max looked great. In a scene late in the episode in which Joel and Tess explore a darkened building with flashlights, the beams made a horrific infected body pop, and the shadows added a ton of atmosphere while not appearing too dark to actually see.

On our colorimeter, we found the screens to be largely identical for SDR content. They both covered 118% of the sRGB gamut and over 83% of the DCI-P3 gamut, and were around 450 nits of brightness. Those colors are better than the prior-gen 16-inch MacBook Pro, though seemingly at the expense of some brightness, though I certainly didn’t have any issues.

Some in the PC space have made the move to OLED, which Apple hasn’t done on its Macs yet. The Dell XPS 15’s OLED touchscreen covered slightly more of both color gamuts, though it wasn’t as bright as Apple’s displays (the 14-inch MacBook Pro reached 450 nits, the 16-inch laptop hit 447 nits).

In HDR content, the Macs could climb higher. At 40% coverage, the 14-inch laptop hit a peak brightness at 1,491 nits, while the 16-inch notebook hit 1,470.

By default, Apple uses a feature called True Tone to make the display adapt to different lighting conditions, which is great for watching movies or browsing the web. If you’re working with photos, graphic design or videos, though, you may want to turn it off for the most accurate rendition of your work.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The scissor switches on the MacBook Pro are solid, and in the exact same layouts on both the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro. You get backlit keys in a black well, which looks sleek. The full-sized function keys are a welcome reprieve from the ones on the Intel-based models (or the Touch Bar).

On the monkeytype typing test, I reached 120 words per minute using the 16-inch laptop’s keyboard, with a standard 2% error rate.

Macs continue to have best-in-class trackpads. The 14-incher’s Force Touch trackpad is 5.1 x 3.2 inches, while the 16-incher has a gargantuan 6.3 x 3.9 inch touchpad. Both use haptic feedback, so you can click anywhere on the touchpad. Both laptops have plenty of room for macOS gestures, even the ones that require three fingers.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (2023)

The 16-inch MacBook Pro continues to have my favorite speakers on any laptop, especially outside of gaming. Both the 14-incher and 16-incher have a six-speaker sound system, but for my money, the 16-incher just sounds slightly more detailed.

Both get loud and can fill a room with sound. Fall Out Boy’s Love From The Other Side was balanced and detailed on the 16-inch Pro, with well-leveled guitars, vocals, drums and bass. It sounds excellent on the 14-inch model, too, and if they weren’t together, I wouldn’t notice the slight differences. I found the 14 didn’t get quite as loud, and that the bass and drums sounded ever-so-slightly better on the bigger model.

Both laptops support Apple’s spatial audio on supported apps, and also allow for Dolby Atmos on supported movies and TV. You can also get spatial audio over Airpods, and Apple claims that the 3.5 mm headphone jack offer pros advanced support for high-impedance headphones.

Upgradeability of the MacBook Pro (2023)

While all that separates you from the inside of your MacBook Pro are eight pentalobe screws, don’t expect to be making any upgrades here.

Firstly, pentalobe screws aren’t terribly common. But more importantly, the RAM is part of the M2 Pro and M2 Max system on a chip, while the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. Configure your laptop with the memory and storage you’re going to need to make it last.

As of this writing, some manuals for the new MacBook Pros are available through Apple’s website and Self Service repair, but the full repair manuals have not been uploaded. Some teardowns have shown that there are some internal changes, including around the cooler and layout of the RAM and SSD on the motherboard.

Battery Life on the MacBook Pro (2023)

Apple likes to tout the efficiency of its systems, and for good reason. Both the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros proved to be long-lasting on our battery test, which continuously browses the web, runs OpenGL tests and streams video, all while connected to Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro, with its 100 WHr battery, ran for 18 hours and 56 minutes — more than 3 hours of improvement over the 2021 version. The 14-inch MacBook Pro, with a 70 WHr battery, lasted 14:21. The Dell XPS 15 ran for 9:43, though its OLED panel is likely a factor in its shorter runtime.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (2023)

We ran our heat test on the MacBook Pro while running our Cinebench R23 gauntlet to get a sense of how hot the chassis gets to the touch during a stressful multi-core workload.

On the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the center of the keyboard reached 45.8 degrees Celsius (114.4 degrees Fahrenheit), while the trackpad was a cooler 30.9 C (87.62 F). On the 16-inch laptop, the center of the keyboard hit 43.1 C (109.58 F), while the touchpad hit 29.9 C (85.82 F). The 16-inch clearly kept these common touchpoints cooler, though neither seemed too uncomfortable to use.

Apple may have overestimated its ability to create a Mac Pro with an Apple Silicon chip

When Apple announced the transition of Macs powered by Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon in 2020, the company said it would complete the transition of the entire lineup in two years. However, that timeline has passed, and Apple still has one Intel Mac available in its lineup: the Mac Pro. Did Apple overestimate its ability to build a Mac Pro with an Apple Silicon chip?

A phased transition

Changing the processors of an entire lineup of computers is certainly not an easy task. However, Apple has plenty of experience in this regard. Apple’s first computers ran on Motorola processors, but the company decided to migrate to the new PowerPC platform in 1994.

While this brought benefits at the time, the PowerPC processors weren’t delivering what Apple expected. In 2005, the company confirmed the transition from PowerPC to Intel. At the time, Apple said that the transition would be complete by the end of 2007. However, the transition was fully completed in August 2006, when PowerMac was replaced by the first Intel Mac Pro.

In June 2020, Apple confirmed that it would change the Mac processors from Intel to ARM chips, or “Apple Silicon chips.” These are the same chips found in devices such as the iPhone and iPad, which have proven to be quite powerful and extremely efficient. In November 2020, Apple announced the first Macs with the M1 chip: the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini.

At the same event, Apple said that the transition of the entire lineup of Macs would be completed in two years. It didn’t take long for another important Mac to get the M1 chip. In April 2021, it was the iMac’s turn. Then, in October 2021, Apple introduced the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the high-end versions of the MacBook Pro.

There was only one Mac left behind

With the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini all updated with the M1 chip, there was only one other Mac left to get an Apple Silicon chip, and that was the Mac Pro; but Apple still had a whole year ahead to introduce the Apple Silicon Mac Pro on schedule.

Internally, however, things didn’t seem to be going well. Rumors suggested that Apple was still in doubt about changing the Mac Pro’s processor to Apple Silicon. In 2021, Bloomberg reported that the company had been working on an updated version of the Intel Mac Pro. References to this model were later found in a beta version of Xcode. However, Apple hasn’t released a new Intel Mac Pro since 2019.

In early 2022, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been working on a brand new Mac that would sit between the M1 Mac mini and the Intel Mac Pro. And it turns out that we were right – Apple introduced the Mac Studio in March last year with expanded I/O and the new M1 Ultra chip.

Mac Studio essentially came as an alternative for professional users who wanted a powerful machine with the new Apple Silicon chips while the company was still working on the new Mac Pro. Of course, Mac Studio also targets consumers who don’t need everything that a Mac Pro has to offer. But the two-year deadline was approaching, and there was still no sign of an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

Where is the Apple Silicon Mac Pro?

In June 2022, Apple announced the M2 chip with a new generation MacBook Air. At that point, it seemed extremely unlikely that the company would introduce a new Mac Pro based on the M1 chip. Multiple rumors have pointed out that the wait for the new Mac Pro would be worth it, though. The machine was expected to have expandability and a new “Extreme” chip that would combine two M2 Ultra chips, which is yet to be announced.

However, the latest rumors have poured cold water on people who were waiting for a true Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Bloomberg recently reported that Apple has scrapped the idea of designing an “M2 Extreme” chip for the Mac Pro due to its complexity and cost concerns. At the same time, the machine is not expected to support RAM upgrades, and it may also not support third-party GPUs as well.

And even with all these compromises, it remains unclear when Apple will introduce a new Mac Pro. But the main question is: What’s “Pro” about this Mac Pro, anyway? Mac Pro was never just about performance. Mac Pro is about letting users customize it as they need it, it’s about expandability.

Top comment by thadec

I am not an Apple guy. I usually post on 9to5Google. but I think that you got it fundamentally wrong here.

Apple products are Apple products. Apple is in complete control. Meaning that a Mac Pro is whatever Apple says it is.

Compare the original iPhone to what it is now.

Compare the original iPod to the iPod Touch.

The Apple TV has been fundamentally redesigned twice (and rumor has it will be relaunched again as a gaming console).

The iMac, approaching 25, now serves a completely different purpose than the original.

Mac Mini? From a cheap device to lure platform switchers to a mini-workstation.

What does above mean? That Apple was never under any obligation to replicate the Intel Xeon W / AMD Radeon workstation with an equivalent Apple Silicon device to begin with. Instead, can completely redefine the Mac Pro as they did the products above.

And why not? Not that hard to do. The Mac Pro was once a favored device for the entertainment media, but Hollywood has migrated to Linux. The Mac Pro is now being mostly used as a general purpose workstation, but it doesn’t sell well. Apple can create a cheaper device that is better targeted towards specific consumers that will sell a lot better. The goal shouldn’t be to compete with AMD Threadripper workstations with Nvidia Ampere GPUs. Leave that to the Linux guys. The Mac Pro just has to be the best device available for Apple customers.

Apple can certainly create a powerful M2 Ultra chip. However, the current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM with 64GB of advanced graphics. And while this is too much for the vast majority of customers, there are customers working with really demanding tasks that need such specifications and also the flexibility to upgrade the hardware.

Mac Studio and Mac Pro

So if the Mac Pro won’t have an exclusive chip and won’t have upgradeable RAM? What will differentiate it from Mac Studio? Not much, apparently. A recent report suggested that Apple is even considering not launching a new Mac Studio anytime soon because the new Mac Pro will essentially be a more powerful Mac Studio.

Apple created Mac Studio to fill the gap until the Apple Silicon version of the Mac Pro was ready. As it turns out, making an Apple Silicon Mac Pro seems more difficult than the company was expecting. Don’t get me wrong, Apple’s chips are great and the vast majority of consumers will have a great time with a Mac equipped with an M2 Ultra chip. But there are still professionals working in Hollywood studios who need a true Mac Pro.

In the past, the company has already disappointed such professionals with the 2013 Mac Pro, which lacked the same level of expandability as previous generations. If the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is indeed what the rumors suggest, the company may face another major rejection from its loyal Pro users.

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Is Apple making a Mac Pro nobody wants?

It’s been a rough decade for the Mac Pro. In 2013, Apple released a weird cylindrical model that didn’t meet the needs of most of Apple’s professional customers and wasn’t really upgradeable. In 2017, Apple called a bunch of tech journalists into a room and reaffirmed their commitment to the Mac, promising a new Mac Pro. That Mac Pro shipped in late 2019… less than two years before Apple made the announcement that it was shifting the Mac off of Intel and onto its own processors.

Just short of the 10th anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.

Is Apple rethinking its commitment to the Mac Pro? And, given the many powerful characteristics of Apple silicon Macs, should it?

Niche of a niche

Let’s start with the facts: Almost nobody buys Mac Pros. The Mac is roughly 10 percent of Apple’s overall business, and it’s safe to say that at least 75 percent of Mac sales are laptops. That leaves a fraction of a fraction to be fought over by the iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. It’s pretty unlikely that the one that starts at 6,000 is going to be a large portion of those desktop sales.

But just because the Mac Pro is a niche product within a niche category within a small corner of Apple’s overall business doesn’t mean it’s not important. The arguments for Apple to keep a powerful expandable desktop at the top of the Mac line are numerous. Obviously, some markets simply require powerful, modular, expandable systems–and if Apple can’t provide them, they’ll lose out on those sales. (And if a market switches from the Mac at the high end, it’s possible that the rest of the computers in that market will also go from Macs to PCs.)

Then more broadly, there’s the “flagship” argument: The high-end Mac shows off everything the platform is capable of. Apple might not sell many of them, but their existence helps the Mac platform as a whole. And perhaps, as with the tech NASA developed for the Apollo program, Apple’s work pushing the very high end of Mac performance will create spin-off value that will accrue to the rest of the product line.

Or as Apple’s Phil Schiller said back in 2017:

Mac Pro is actually a small percentage of our CPUs — just a single-digit percent. However, we don’t look at it that way. The way we look at it is that there is an ecosystem here that is related. So there might be a single-digit percentage of pros who use a Mac Pro; there’s that 15 percent base that uses Pro software frequently and 30 percent who use it casually, and these are related. These are not distinct little silos. There’s a connection between all of this.

That’s Schiller explaining that the Mac Pro is valuable because… well, because it’s connected to the people who use Pro software a little and who use Pro software a lot, and… it’s all related, I guess? It sure seems a lot squishier when you think about it.

The Mac Pro isn’t a product you make if the bottom line is all you care about. It’s the kind of product you make because you want it to burnish your reputation, to use it to boast about your prowess in designing computers and the chips that go in them. You make it because the experts in key fields want you to, and you love highlighting how your computers are used in those glamorous or exciting fields. You make it because “there’s a connection between all of this,” whatever this is.

Apple silicon doesn’t fit

Here’s the problem with the Mac Pro on Apple silicon: Apple has spent more than a decade designing mobile processors to be power efficient, to share a fast pool of memory between CPU cores and GPU cores, and to integrate Apple-built GPU cores inside the same chip package. It’s a model that was made for the iPhone, but it turns out that it scales pretty well to the iPad and, as we’ve discovered over the last few years, even to the Mac.

That’s great, but the Mac Pro doesn’t want to be any of that. It doesn’t want to learn any of those lessons. A big tower Mac doesn’t worry about energy efficiency. It’s got huge cooling fans and is plugged into the wall. It wants expansion slots to load in more GPU horsepower. It wants loads of expandable memory. It wants what Apple silicon was never designed to provide.

This is not to say that Apple couldn’t redesign things to fit the Mac Pro. But… do you re-think fundamental design decisions of the processor architecture that has led you to great success in phones, tablets, and all the other Mac models, all for a niche of a niche? This is one of the key questions of the next Mac Pro: Did Apple bend its chip-design philosophy for the Mac Pro, or did it bend the definition of a Mac Pro to feature its chips?

I can’t say that I’m encouraged by Mark Gurman’s report at Bloomberg that Apple has scrapped plans for an “M2 Extreme”, essentially four M2 Max chips (or two M2 Ultra chips) put together, which was originally planned to power the new Mac Pro. If Gurman is right, it means that the new Mac Pro will be powered by the next generation of the M1 Ultra chip that was introduced in the Mac Studio last year.

Minimal Mac Pro

So what makes a Mac Pro a Mac Pro? If it’s a tower enclosure, Apple’s got a relatively fresh one from 2019 that it can just roll out again. (Gurman says that’s now the plan, which is also a little disconcerting when you consider that the original reports suggested a new, half-height enclosure and that quad-M2 chip.) But what’s inside the Mac Pro matters, and if it’s just an M2 Ultra chip, it’s hard not to consider the new Mac Pro just a Mac Studio that moved out of its apartment and into a mini-mansion.

Does it help if there’s expandable internal storage? Sure, I suppose–it’s certainly a lot neater than attaching drives via external ports. Does it help if Apple offers additional M2 GPU cores via some sort of proprietary add-on card system? Maybe, if it’s done the extra engineering work. What about RAM expansion? Sure, but again, such a choice would undercut the work Apple has done to create a pool of fast, shared memory right next to the CPUs and GPUs.

And all that custom work, all those distortions to what makes Apple silicon so successful, would be done for a product that’s a niche of a niche–and it’s work that Apple’s chip design team could have spent on a next-generation chip for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The final countdown

Is it worth it? I honestly don’t know the answer. It’s hard to imagine that building a new Mac Pro that’s anything but a big Mac Studio is worth it in terms of chip-design resources and money. But as much as I am baffled by Schiller’s statement in 2017 about everything being connected, if decision-makers at Apple truly believe it, then it’s the best case I can find for building one.

The danger here is that Apple’s forcing itself to build a computer that doesn’t really make financial sense, and along the way, it’s reduced the scope of the project to the point where the final product will also be a computer that nobody really wants to buy. That’s bad for all concerned.

But as harsh as I’ve been in this article, I’ll say this: I want Mac Pro users to be happy. I want the new Apple silicon Mac Pro, when it finally arrives, to justify Apple’s promises back in 2017. I’ve just got a bad feeling that the Mac Pro and the Apple silicon era aren’t as compatible as we were all hoping they’d be.

New Mac Pro: M2 Extreme chip, design, release date, and latest rumors

Apple is readying a new Mac Pro. Its last iteration was unveiled during the WWDC 2019 keynote when Apple ditched the trashcan design for a cheese grater one. After three years, the company announced it was developing a new Mac Pro, and it would talk more about this product in the future. As 2022 is coming to an end, here’s when the company could unveil this product and what to expect from it so far.

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Design

The design of the Mac Pro changed a lot during the years. According to Bloomberg, this new generation is “expected to look like a smaller version of the current design.”

Currently, this product looks a lot like a classic CPU with a stainless steel finish and a cheese grater-like front to help dissipate the heat. If what Bloomberg heard is right, Apple could make the new Mac Pro thinner while still being as powerful as ever.

New Mac Pro could feature the M2 Extreme processor

The new Mac Pro will likely feature some chips of the M2 family. Last May, Bloomberg reported that Apple was working on an all-new Mac Pro with 40 cores:

Codenamed Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, a redesigned Mac Pro is planned to come in 20 or 40 computing core variations, made up of 16 high-performance or 32 high-performance cores and four or eight high-efficiency cores. The chips would also include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics. The computing core counts top the 28 core maximum offered by today’s Intel Mac Pro chips, while the higher-end graphics chips would replace parts now made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

In an October report, MacWorld discusses what to expect from the M2 processors that Apple will still unveil. After the M2 chip was announced alongside a 13-inch MacBook Pro and 13-inch MacBook Air, which we reviewed here, the company could be readying a new M2 Pro, M2 Max, M2 Ultra, and even M2 Extreme processors.

The publication uses the standard M2 chip by extrapolating “some possible specs for the rest of the M2-series,” which are “based on the same doubling up of components in the M1-series.” With that in mind, here’s what the M2 lineup could look like:

• M2: 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, up to 24GB RAM
• M2 Pro (predicted): up to 10-core CPU, up to 20-core GPU, up to 48GB RAM
• M2 Max (predicted): up to 10-core CPU, 40-core GPU, up to 96GB RAM
• M2 Ultra (predicted): 24-core CPU, 80-core GPU, up to 192GB RAM
• M2 Extreme (predicted): 48-core CPU, 160-core GPU cores, up to 384GB RAM

Release date: When Apple will unveil a new Mac Pro?

Just like the company did in 2019, Apple could unveil a new Mac Pro in the coming months and launch it in 2023. According to MacWorld, Apple will likely announce new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips this month.

As the Mac Pro will likely feature the M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme processors, the company might wait until a Spring event to unveil its most powerful Mac to date. It’s still unclear what will be the future of the Mac Studio once Apple releases this other product and upgrades the 2020 Mac mini.

Wrap up

This is everything we know so far about the new Mac Pro. Once we hear more from it, we’ll make sure to update this story.

This article talks about:

José is a Tech News Reporter at BGR. He has previously covered Apple and iPhone news for 9to5Mac, and was a producer and web editor for Latin America broadcaster TV Globo. He is based out of Brazil.

The new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros are here — say “hello” to M2 Pro and M2 Max power

Apple has officially announced the revamped 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, both with a choice of M2 Pro or M2 Max chipsets.

After what has been months of will they/won’t they speculation that started with an early 2023 release window, followed by a potential delay to later in the year, Apple has just updated its website with the big news we all wanted to see.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

The most obvious thing to notice on first sight is that absolutely nothing has changed in terms of the utilitarian aesthetic. The same essential ports are still present, you’re still getting that same larger half-eaten fruit logo emblazoned on the lid, and that same amazing keyboard and touchpad is still here.

Also here is the same 14.2 and 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR displays — packing a 3024 x 1964 and 3456 x 2234-pixel resolutions respectively, alongside that same 120Hz refresh rate.

The big differences are going to be what you find under the hood, and yes it’s exactly what you expected. M2 Pro and M2 Max have broken cover in these new systems.

The Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro. On the other hand, the Max pushes this even further with a larger GPU with up to 38 cores and a 30% increase in performance over M1 Max.

Alongside this as well, just as we saw with the M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, the bandwidth for RAM has increased too, which means you can spec this with up to a massive 96GB of memory.

Two other key updates include a bump to Wi-Fi 6E for 6GHz support and a HDMI port that supports up to 4K 240Hz.

Outlook

So, this was the minor spec bump that rumors suggested. We’ll save our full thoughts for a proper hands-on review, but it’s fair to say we’re rather excited to see how big the gains are here compared to the previous generation.

have, fortunately, remained the same with a starting cost of 1,999. But we do now have the new super spec of 96GB, which will set you back an eyewatering 6,499. Is that a price creative pros are willing to pay? Depending on the workload demands, quite possibly.

The leaks reported earlier today and yesterday fall in line with the launch schedule we’re seeing, with pre-orders available starting today and orders shipping for January 24.

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