Oh how I wish Steve was still running Apple. Maybe it wouldn’t be
a 3 trillion dollar company, but BS like this probably wouldn’t have happened,
but with the current landscape we have to be honest about this machine which shouldn’t exist,
at least with the configuration and pricing its at. With that, this won’t just be a hater video,
I’ll also mention who this machine will be good for and its strengths.
Now let me take a step back and say yes, we have been pretty negative about this MacBook Pro,
fueled by Apple apologists that always take their side
and our viewers that pushed us to do more testing and get to the bottom of these issues
and those who disputed our findings saying they don’t matter in the real-world.
With that, many people who walk into a retailer and pick up one of these base models,
which is the one that is mostly stocked everywhere,
as long as they are using it the same way they that Apple markets the MacBook Air
they will be fine and won’t notice any issues, especially if they're coming from an intel Mac.
But if that person looked at Apple’s marketing page talking about portable editing bays
capable of multi-stream 8K, Advanced thermal systems for sustained pro levels of performance
for CPU and GPU intensive tasks for hours on end, Superfast SSD’s opening everything in a flash,
and Pro level tasks like video editing, transcoding, photo stitching and image processing
way faster than an M1, well you might not be as thrilled if you want to do these tasks,
especially if you have a few web browsing tab’s open and two applications and the M2 is taking
seconds longer just to switch tabs or images in Photoshop both systems opened the same way.
I’ve done all of these tasks with my M1’s, and I know more than 5 creatives
make well into the 5 figures using 2020 M1’s because they do the job more than well enough,
pushing their systems harder than we did in our test.
Because of that and Apple’s marketing, I don’t buy the premise that the 13” Pro isn’t for Pro’s,
it is for Pro’s, those that can’t afford to buy the clearly better 14” model,
and didn’t have to before since even the base M1 MacBook Air
did a killer job for productivity and multitasking as we’ve shown in our videos.
And the premise that people that care about performance won’t buy the base model, well,
within our audience that clearly cares about performance, based on our affiliate
sales close to 3 times as many people bought base models compared to higher specced ones.
With that, unlike the M1 MacBook Pro, Apple is not selling the 16GB M2 models in stores now,
and this speaks to our opinion that the whole reason
for this Machine is to push more people into buying a 14” MacBook Pro.
The M2 chip isn’t bad, far from it. It is a good improvement over the M1 if it's paired
with a dual nand storage setup and 16GB of RAM. It ends up reaching
the marketing numbers that Apple shows off, and being super fast for photo processing,
taking just 1 min and 7 seconds to process 50 RAW images in Adobe lightroom, smoking
its Dell competitor, and if you’re multitasking it barely slows down taking just 7 seconds longer.
Exporting video in Davinci Resolve 18 is blazing fast as well for this model,
as are so many other things. The only issue is the 14” is even faster
with much better features, and is only $100 more since it's constantly on sale.
Most people that are still interested in the 13” are on a budget and are
getting the Pro for the active cooling meaning they do want to do productivity,
but the base model is much slower than the optimal one,
almost twice as slow for image processing which is something we’ve never seen before.
And thats of course because of the slow base SSD that's even slower than a $600
64GB iPad Air, and the reason why it make such an impact on performance
is because of the way Apple Silicon is design and their unified memory
that makes the chips so dang fast and responsive, as long as its fed fast enough,
but can slow down way more than intel Macs would if you have slow storage used for swap.
Heck, have you seen your intel Mac take 12 seconds to switch between a photo like this base
model does, while the optimal one was instant. Now this won’t always happen, we had two productivity
apps open and 10 web browsing tabs, so if you only use one app at a time and close your web
browser whenever you do so, you’ll be fine, but this isn’t something we had to do with our M1’s.
Now if thats pushing it too hard, even with 5 web browsing tabs and 1 app the base model
m1 air you can buy for $850 (for now atleast) was almost twice as fast under that workload,
so those that say Apple skimping on SSD’s doesn’t make a real world deal, please
do some actual testing before throwing shade on social media.
Video editing is almost identical in FCX if you have only final cut open,
but with web browsing and photoshop open like I often do
while I’m waiting for a video to render, Base M2 Pro is more than twice as slow.
I don’t care what your justifications are, under no circumstance should a fanless
2020 base model M1 air with binned 7 core graphics thats often sold
for $850 be able to be twice as fast as a brand new M2 pro machine that
is heavily marketed for these tasks. And yes they were set up identically.
Some have called our deep testing showing off these issues unethical because people
won’t buy these machines, well we think its unethical for Apple to make a product like this
and market it so heavily while knowing most will buy the base model,
and they are with the base model being on #17 of amazon top 100 laptops while the 512 was at #73,
and of course the 16GB isn’t a stocked model at all now.
After all of this, I think there is only one reason Apple chose to do this,
and no its not because of the chip shortage or Western digital's chip loss,
Apple doesn’t use their storage chips and SSD prices have dropped a ton over the last year.
It’s pure profit. The M1 laptops were way too good. We told a lot of you that you’d
be just fine with even a base model and we showed the proof in our multi-tasking ram
stress tests. A lot of my creative professional friends bought them to use temporarily as they
waited for the higher end Apple silicon MacBooks to come out, but once they did,
they didn’t upgrade because the M1’s did handle their tough workloads perfectly fine.
So how do you get people to spend more money,
you make the base product worst so people have to spend more, and don’t stock the 16GB
model so many will just jump to the real pro laptops, and if they do custom order,
you’ll make massive profit margins on this machine where most parts are from 2016.
Now some people say they had to go with the slower single storage chip
because 128GB modules are harder to get now or more expensive, but thats
the point, a Pro machine shouldn’t come with 256GB in 2022 anyways.
Dell starts their XPS 13 Plus with 512GB now, and its much faster storage than Apples.
A lot of these slowdowns wouldn’t happen if it shipped with 512 as base,
and it would cost Apple no more than $2.07 to make it a 512 machine, yea thats how little that chip
costs, likely even less since Apple orders in huge volumes. So its not the availability or price of
the storage like Apple apologists stated, but the fact that them spending $2 would lose them a $200
upgrade that way more people are doing now because of our testing, so its working in their favor.
So let's meet in the middle Apple, how about raising this profit margin machine to $1399
instead so all of their Pro marketed machines have 512 that as base.. You
still get the recycled design from 2016 with a 720P webcam, worse speakers than even the m1 air,
no fast charging, no magsafe so you have to use one of the two ports to charge.
Well, then Apple would probably be in a similar situation where pro’s that are on a budget
would spend less and not be guided up that perfect staircase where moving up in spec and
model just makes sense because its just a little bit more for that big increase in performance.
The M1 machines broke that because they were too dang good, but now the lineup works perfectly.
M2 Air is for regular people that don’t have too high expectations because of the fanless design.
M2 Pro is for Pro’s as its marketied but the base model is worse than M1 if you multi-tasks,
so you need the 512, but if you really want the M2 chip to work as advertised you need the 16GB
which isn’t sold in stores so you if you need it quick you’ll spend more on a 14”,
and if you do end up spending $1700 on a 16GB 512 model Apple is making mind
blowing profit margins on this machine so at that point they don’t care that you didn’t buy a 14”.
Now a few more positives on this machine, the battery life is excellent regardless of what
you do. If you need insane battery life this will give you a few hours more than the Air but of
course when it comes time to charge it takes about twice as long.
And of course that fan that doesn’t keep up with full cpu and gpu loads, is enough for most use
cases and will keep the M2 chip running at full performance where the M2 air will definitely slow
down for extended loads.
Overall, this is probably the worst machine Apple has ever released
when you factor in the target audience and the previous model that was released
along with the other current models, and almost no one should buy it.
Sure, many people that are buying it will be happy with how it performs,
but that doesn’t make it the right choice and it doesn’t make it right.