it's been just over a week since apple's m2 macbook pro has been out in the wild
and so far we've found seven problems with it after one week some that aren't
as big of a deal and some that have literally caused people to cancel their
orders which might actually be the right move here because man apple kind of
messed up on the ssd situation but before i get into that huge problem let
me first start off with some of the other ones that we've noticed over the
past week the first problem is that the m2 macbook pro uses exactly the same
design with absolutely no changes even keeping the same touch bar which a lot
of people did not like including myself meanwhile the macbook air gets a full
redesign with so many updates and changes a beautiful display that's a
little bit larger with slimmer bezels and basically an awesome new design but
with this one apple even reused old m1 macbook pro boxes and literally put a
new m2 sticker over the old one and that's definitely not what apple is
known for doing this kind of shows that apple doesn't really care about this
product or at least not enough to make some new boxes with an updated wallpaper
to make people feel like it's a new product now for problem number two
nothing else was upgraded in terms of the actual feature set we have the same
exact speakers no changes same keyboard same trackpad basically everything's the
same the display is the same no changes at all it even has the same 720p webcam
while the less expensive m2 macbook air is getting the 1080p webcam that is a
huge disappointment not only that but this macbook is the only one that now is
not getting magsafe 3 for convenient and fast charging now problem number three
has to do with apple's marketing which is a bit overboard with this m2 macbook
pro first of all apple showed off that the m2 chip supports 8k h.264 and hevc
encoders and decoders so this got me very excited thinking that this m2
macbook pro is gonna be the best bang for the buck video editing laptop out
there because it's equipped with the fan and it has the m2 chip with 8k encoders
across the board however when we tested a 5 minute 4k hevc export which is very
common it was only 5 seconds faster than the m1 pro chip which has basically the
same encoders as the m1 now that is hugely disappointing because apple never
marketed the m1 pro encoders as supporting 8k but they did for the m2
and apparently 8k means 5 seconds faster now it is nice that apple put in the pro
res media engine because it actually does help quite a lot but the whole 8k
h.264 and hevc media engine part was way overdoing it compared to the five second
difference that we actually experienced now yes there might be some updates
coming but apple should honestly be shipping the correct software updates
right away while launching new products you shouldn't have to wait until mac os
ventura comes out or future updates to use the machine at its full potential
and now moving on to problem number four we have thermal throttling and there is
a lot to unpack here but i'm gonna start with how much power the m2 chip uses in
the cinebench r23 stress test the m2 chip's cpu used 36 more power to get 13
more multi-core performance which is definitely disappointing because it
shows that apple really had to boost the clock speeds to squeeze out that extra
performance improvement and the issue with overclocking the performance cores
that much is that it causes instability which we noticed in our logic pro music
production stress test where the whole point is to run as many tracks as
possible without overloading the chat and the crazy thing is that the previous
m1 macbook pro was able to run 81 tracks without overloading while the new m2
chip overloaded while running only 76 tracks which points to instability
within the chip and to prove that stability is what matters for the logic
pro stress test intel's xeon chips always performed much better in this
test compared to the regular core i9 cpus that were actually faster in terms
of raw cpu performance so stability matters for this test but that's not the
end of the story because we experienced severe thermal throttling on this m2
macbook pro more so than any macbook we've ever used before what we did was
run an extreme stress test which is exporting canon 8k raw from the canon r5
to 4k hevc now i will admit that this is an extreme test that isn't meant for the
target market of the m2 macbook pro but i specifically wanted to max out the cpu
and gpu as much as possible to stress out the cooling system as much as
possible and honestly the truth is that a computer's cooling system especially
one that's fully sealed like this empty macbook pro and not upgradable should be
able to properly cool down the chip that's inside of it without severely
thermal throttling because if it can't that extra performance is being wasted
and the thing is that we ran this exact extreme stress test on the previous m1
macbook pro and the gpu was stuck at 100 load the entire time without throttling
while requiring the fan to be basically maxed out and then on the 14-inch
macbook pro it also adequately cooled down the m1 pro chip without even maxing
out the fans but watch what happens to the m2 macbook pro during the export
test the fan was stuck at maximum 7 200 rpms basically the entire time hitting
as much as 108 degrees celsius multiple times which is higher than we've seen
even on intel max and since the fan was already maxed out the system had no
choice but to drastically cut back on the clock speeds with the performance
course going from 3200 megahertz to 1894 the efficiency core is going from 22 28
megahertz to 1444 and the gpu from 1393 to
289 megahertz all within a split second which caused the temps to drop from 108
degrees to around 84 degrees celsius before restarting the cycle over and
over again and the craziest thing was that the m2 macbook pro cut the power to
the m2 chip from around 29.5 watts all the way down to 7.3 watts which is the
most severe thermal throttling i've ever seen on any macbook including intel
macbooks and when it finally finished the test it was drastically slower than
the m1 pro macbook pro and it was only 10 faster than the previous m1 model
even though that model was gpu limited the entire time which is disappointing
because without thermal throttling the m2 cpu is 18 faster and the gpu is 35
faster so we should expect better performance in this test and not only
just 10 and now moving on to problem number five we have the ssd issue which
has basically blown up all over the internet with the base model m2 macbook
pro with 256 gigs of ssd apple chose to only fill one of the ssd spots on the
logic board compared to the previous m1 macbook pro which had both of the spots
filled and this is basically causing the transfer speeds to be drastically
reduced as much as two times slower for the read speed compared to the previous
m1 macbook pro and the crappy thing about that is that it's gonna slow down
your large file transfers it could potentially slow down the opening and
loading of apps and games compared to the previous m1 macbook pro but what
really blew our mind was that this ssd is slower than apple's ipad air 5 with
only a 64 gigabyte ssd and that ipad starts at just six hundred dollars
instead of thirteen hundred dollars for the m2 macbook pro and now for problem
number six not only did apple switch to one nand ship instead of two on the base
model which instantly cuts away half of the channels but the actual nand chips
themselves are worse quality than on previous macbooks and to prove this we
actually tested the 512 gig ssd model of the m2 macbook pro so what we did is
compare the m2 macbook pro to our previous 16-inch intel 2019 macbook pro
model that seems like it has slower ssd write speeds than the 512 gig ssd in the
m2 macbook pro according to the blackmagic disc test and we did a large
file transfer and we found that it finished faster on the old intel model
compared to this new m2 macbook pro with a 512 gigabyte ssd and how is that
possible well it seems like apple is starting to use lower quality ssds that
slow down more after a certain amount of data is transferred specifically when
the intel 16 inches ssd slowed down it continued to transfer at about 900
megabytes per second which is pretty good but on the m2 macbook pro's 512 gig
ssd once it slowed down it went all the way down to an average of around 350
megabytes per second which caused it to transfer the file slower basically
almost a minute slower so what this essentially means is that apple
downgraded the quality of these new nand ssd chips compared to the previous ones
which means that apple is trying to save money so we did a bit of research online
and we found that a gig flash nand wafer costs apparently
only two dollars and four cents on the chinese market which was updated today
as i'm filming this so this shows that apple is trying to squeeze every ounce
of profit margin out of this m2 macbook pro in order to keep the base price at
the same 1299 while upgrading it with the m2 chip so from what it seems like
the supply chain and inflationary issues are probably worse than we think with
apple making such a weird change going from two chips to one on the base model
ruining the performance and in my opinion apple made a huge mistake and
misjudgment by choosing to cut costs on this specific part of the macbook pro
particularly because of the seventh and final problem for this video the slow
256 gig base ssd is negatively impacting the performance of the virtual memory
swap because when the very low eight gigs of ram which honestly shouldn't
even be an option on the mt macbook pro when that fills up it has to resort to
the ssd to use as virtual memory and the slower the ssd is the slower that
virtual memory is as well which slows down performance so we ended up testing
this by opening 10 chrome tabs in the background and then running a couple of
real world tests and multiple times the m2 macbook pro ended up being slower
than the previous m1 macbook pro this should never happen the new model
performing worse than the old model this is embarrassing and it's a huge fail by
apple for choosing to go with just that one nand chip so with that said i can
safely say that apple messed up badly with the m2 macbook pro and the worrying
part about all of this is that there's a good chance that the m2 macbook air also
comes with the slow ssd issue as well as likely suffering even more from thermal
throttling issues not only in extreme tests like the one that we ran but
probably even in more of the common tests as well so honestly i've got to
say that i'm a bit disappointed with the m2 macbook pro so there you guys go
those were the top seven problems with the m2 macbook pro and if you disagree
with any of them let me know down in the comment section below but if you enjoyed
this video and it was insightful to you go ahead and click the circle above to
subscribe because we have a lot more testing to go especially the m2 macbook
air and definitely check out one of those two right over there thanks for
watching and we'll see you in the next video