(upbeat music)
- All right, so this is the new 13 Inch M2 MacBook Pro
and I don't think anyone should actually buy it.
- Wait what?
- Yeah, no, I think it's a great computer,
first of all, don't get me wrong,
but with the introduction of the M2 MacBook Air
and the existence of the 14 Inch M1 MacBook Pro,
they've managed to squeeze any reason
for this machine to exist at this price to basically zero.
Nobody should buy it.
- Yeah, but nobody that seems pretty harsh.
Matter of fact, I'm here.
Let me challenge you on that.
This is a great computer, change my mind.
- Okay, well, let's just start with the design.
So Apple's been going through their laptop lineup,
upgrading everything with this new square shape,
larger displays with thinner bezels,
getting rid of the Touch Bar, and actually adding ports,
but this particular refresh didn't get any of that,
so this brand new laptop looks exactly the same
as the M1 MacBook Pro from two years ago
which looks exactly the same
as the 13 inch Intel MacBook Pro
with a Touch Bar that dropped in 2016
because it is exactly the same.
I could give him sustainability credit, I guess,
for recycling and old design
and apparently using the same boxes
from the M1 MacBook Pro just with new stickers on them,
but yeah, this exact shell design is literally six years old
and is starting to look kind of outta place now
next to Apple's other notebooks.
Like can you imagine any other company
trying to reuse a six year old design?
You trying to tell me a 2016 ASUS laptop
re-release would fly today
like a six year old XPS drop, like that's wild.
- Yeah, but this isn't that.
Let me tell you, if it ain't broke, don't fix it
and I'm not just saying that.
This is a really good laptop design.
All metal jacket, a plus hinge,
and let me just remind you,
you reviewed it and you loved it.
The screen was bright and high resolution, still is,
the speakers were best in class,
still are, great track pad and keyboard,
and by the way, some people do really like the Touch Bar.
You said so yourself.
It might not do a whole lot,
but it still has its few advantages.
- Okay, but that is in a vacuum.
That's the thing.
By itself, I would agree with you.
This computer is a perfectly good laptop, buy it,
but as soon as you put it alongside the new MacBook Air,
which is basically the same price,
it's actually worse at basically everything.
I got hands on time with the new M2 MacBook Air
that's about to come out next month, right?
The Air has a larger display with thinner bezels
and in that notch, there's a new 1080p webcam
instead of a six year old 720p webcam.
It has MagSafe with a color matching cable
which enables Fast Charging
and essentially frees up an extra port since
that's one more USBC port that you're not plugged into
and it's all in a package that's thinner,
weighs less, and is basically the same price,
so why would you buy this MacBook Pro?
How is it even Pro anymore?
- You know what, that's a good question.
Why would you buy this Pro?
The answer I think first of all
is it is the cheapest Pro in the lineup,
technically it's true, but really the reason you'd get this
over the Air is the thicker chassis supports active cooling,
so it's got a fan and all the benefits that come with that.
The benchmarks are in
and to the surprise of absolutely no one,
it's pretty clear that this M2 chip is awesome.
It's living up to the 10 to 20% better
multi core CPU performance and even more impressively,
the two extra GPU cores over M1 is giving it 30
to 40% better GPU performance, which is basically
the only area where you could say M1 was lacking.
So this is awesome for any applications
that lean on the GPU.
Everything's faster.
Final Cut is faster, Premier is faster,
any games you might play are all faster,
and the cherry on top
is it has a dramatically improved media engine,
same one from the higher end chips actually,
so you can actually pull off
some heavier Final Cut Pro edits.
So for something like that
while you're in a program for hours
and things are getting hot, okay,
that's when you'd need the fans to kick in,
keep performance high,
longer than the MacBook Air ever could, no throttling.
So if you've got the sustained workloads
and the long performance stuff,
you should get the M2 MacBook Pro.
No, no, those people should just go straight
to the 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
Just go straight to the big brother.
Look, if you know you're gonna be doing workloads
and things that the MacBook Air can't handle,
then you should just go
to the actually pro laptop, the upgraded machine.
If you're gonna get a nice laptop
and you wanna do extra performance stuff on it,
you weren't gonna get the baseline MacBook Pro, right?
You were gonna bump it up,
first of all
because you want at least 16 gigs of memory, right,
and second of all, because the 256 gigs
of baseline Pro storage is kind of insulting
and that version has particularly clipped SSD performance,
worse than even the M1 MacBook Pro.
So to get to one terabyte and 16 gigs,
you're already looking at like $1,900 for this machine.
At that point, just get the 14 inch Pro
because that laptop is on another level of performance.
I mean, don't get me wrong,
it's absolutely awesome to see the jump from M1 to M2
and that's gonna enable a ton more great stuff
for the most popular laptop for the everyday baseline users,
but if you zoom out,
there's still a big difference in performance
when moving up to the higher end chips,
M1 Pro and then M1 Max.
The amount of additional performance you get
for the extra two to $300 is massive.
If that's what you really want, that's what you should get.
Plus you get a much better, brighter mini LED
high refresh rate screen too
and the webcam in the notch is way better
and much better speakers
and you actually get some ports while you're at it.
So I just, I don't know,
you shouldn't get a literal worse version
of all of those things.
- Two to 300 bucks, isn't nothing.
- It's not zero, but I don't know,
really squeezes this new MacBook Pro quite a bit
and plus you can't get around the fact
that it's literally worse at all those things.
- I think you're forgetting something.
- Oh, really?
- The MacBook Pro has studio quality microphones
while the MacBook Air does not.
- So technically they both are listed
as having triple microphone arrays with beam forming.
It's just Apple chose to call the one
in the MacBook Pro studio quality.
It might have a slight difference,
but really are you gonna pay extra for that
and then sacrifice all this other stuff.
- Okay, I think there is one redeeming factor.
- And what is that?
- Battery?
The MacBook Pro has surprisingly excellent battery life,
better than I think pretty much all of us expected.
We saw the 20 hours of video playback quoted on stage,
but in real world use, this might be the best battery life
in any modern laptop we've ever seen.
There's people out here getting 16 to 20 hours
of actual real world use the Verge's laptop reviewer,
Monica, wrote a hilarious piece
about how long it took here to run down a battery
and across the board, it's a tremendously long performer,
so if you want the best battery in any laptop, get this one.
- Okay, so that is awesome to see, but at the same time,
those other laptops already have great battery life too,
so you're not trying to spend
just to get a slightly better battery
and then sacrifice all those other things we talked about.
It's really quite a small difference.
So the ideal customer for this new MacBook Pro M2
is somebody who just needs a slightly better
sustained performance than the new MacBook Air.
- And is willing to sacrifice screen size,
webcam, speakers, ports, thickness, and weight to get it.
For someone who is literally about to buy
the 13 inch M1 MacBook Pro, Enterprise.
- Yep, Enterprise, that's it.