Apple Updates MacBook Pros, Mini With M2 Silicon

Apple fans, rejoice: The company’s long-awaited M2-class MacBook Pros have finally been unveiled. Apple also updated the Mini as well, so the company can cross that one off its to-do list, as there still remained a version of it using Intel silicon. Apple announced new M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs, which will be going into the new MacBook Pros; the Mini only gets the M2 and M2 Pro chips, with the Max only available in notebook form factor.

The biggest news for us is we finally get to see the Pro and Max versions of the M2 SoC. Though we assumed they would be the very first chips to be made on TSMC’s cutting-edge 3nm process, that is not the case. Instead, Apple is calling it a “second generation” 5nm node, which sounds like N4. Despite being made on essentially the same process as the original M1 from 2020, Apple is still claiming big improvements.

The M2 Pro is basically double a regular M2, offering almost twice the GPU cores and twice the memory bandwidth at 200GB/s. Apple claims the M2 Pro’s CPU offers a performance boost of up to 20% over the M1 Pro. On the GPU side, Apple says it’s up to 30% faster. Finally, its updated Neural Engine is up to 40% faster than the previous Pro SoC.

Whereas the Pro is essentially twice the regular M2, the Max offers twice what the Pro offers. It’s packing 67 billion transistors, which is 3x the count in the regular M2. Memory bandwidth is doubled over the Pro to 400GB/s, and its GPU is a bit beefier. It shares the same 12-core CPU configuration as the Pro but boosts GPU core count from 19 to 38 maximum. The M1 Max’s GPU topped out at 32 cores. It also supports up to 96GB of memory now, compared with 64GB for the previous chip. Apple says it’s twice as fast as a Core i9 PC in Davinci Resolve, and 30% faster than the previous Max SoC.

Apple previously offered the Mini with either an M1 SoC or six-core Intel Core i5 or i7 CPUs. Now it’s available with either M2 or M2 Pro. Apple says the M2 Pro version is up to 14x faster than the Intel chip it replaced, and we believe it. That Intel CPU was absolutely ancient and it stuck out like a sore thumb in Apple’s lineup.

The new Minis have been significantly beefed up from the M1 version. This will be good news to folks who didn’t like the M1 version’s limitations, but couldn’t afford the Studio. For example, the Mini was previously limited to just 8GB of RAM, but that’s been doubled to 16GB or 24GB on the M2 midrange model. The version with the Pro SoC starts at 16GB and can be doubled to 32GB. The Mini with M2 now supports up to two displays, which is twice as many as before. The single display limitation was a huge annoyance across Apple’s product line with the M1 and M2. The Pro version can run three displays, making it into an actual computer you can use for real work, finally.

All three new products go on sale Jan. 24. Apple announced the new products via press release and pre-recorded video, which is a departure. The company was expected to announce these in its annual hardware event in October, which never came to pass. They were delayed for reasons unknown, but it’s likely related to something at TSMC.

Regardless, it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see TSMC 3nm silicon in the flesh so to speak. Apple has yet to unveil the M2 Ultra, which will reportedly go into both the Studio and the updated Mac Pro. As far as when we’ll see them, there’s nothing on the calendar for Apple until WWDC in June, unfortunately. However, now that Apple has announced new products out of the blue, perhaps it’ll drop them in the near future without any advance warning as well.

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