Review: 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2022 with M2 chip
Frost in Townsville. Summer turns to winter in Sydney. These photo transformations take an instant on the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Frost in tropical Townsville. Summer turns to winter in Sydney. No, it’s not more terrible weather. I’m using instant photo transformations on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro that use its new M2 processor.
You create the images with Adobe Photoshop’s neural filters, which use machine learning to identify and transform objects. The M2 processor makes the transformation possible in a couple of seconds.
Australian pricing for the new MacBook Pro M2 is the same as in 2020 for the M1 version. A MacBook Pro with the basic 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid state drive is $1999, or $2299 with a 512GB SSD. You can opt for up to 24GB of unified memory and 2 terabytes of storage.
I wouldn’t upgrade from the M1 to the M2 – the jump isn’t that huge – but if you own an older, Intel-based MacBook, or are new to the market, the M2 Pro is an even more compelling choice than the M1 Pro was in 2020. You get bang for the same buck.
(Click on the images to enlarge them.)
Apple gave its competition a clean pair of heels when it ditched Intel processors and released Macs with an M1 processor the company developed itself. The MacBook Pro, Air and MacMini all received the Apple Silicon M1 treatment.
The M1 managed the elusive trifecta of power and decent battery life at an affordable price and proved a hit. There are more powerful laptops with Intel chips, but they don’t deliver on battery life. There are laptops and notebooks with long battery life, but they are optimised to use cutdown versions of operating systems, such as S Mode with Windows 10.
Last year Apple went further, releasing three souped up versions of the M1: the M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra with even more power. The M2 is the next generation of this.
Competition is on the way. Qualcomm confirmed in April that it is on track to produce computer chips that outperformed Apple’s by late 2023. Three senior chip executives who left Apple in 2019 to form Nuvia, a company subsequently swallowed up by Qualcomm for $US1.4bn, are said to be helping the Qualcomm cause.
I currently have a 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro M1 and 2022 MacBook Pro M2 and they are hard to tell apart. They have the same two USB-C Thunderbolt ports at left and headphone port at right.
The new Pro retains the Touch Bar display along the keyboard’s top row. This is despite Apple announcing its axing. Likewise there is no return of the MagSafe power cable foreshadowed by Apple. It seemed Apple didn’t want to disrupt the existing production lines.
There are other advances. The M2 chip has 10 GPU cores instead of 8 in the 2020 model and supports up to 100 Gigabytes per second memory bandwidth. You get fast hardware video encoding and decoding.
Audio is enhanced with Apple’s spatial audio, and there’s support for high-impedance headphones.
I’m not impressed with the selfie camera whose resolution remains at 720p. Apple wasn’t inspired by two years of people making Zoom and Webex calls to notch up its resolution to 1080p. Apple did notch it up on the MacBook Air though. The only justification is the coming macOS Ventura capability of using your iPhone as a selfie camera on Macs.
The CPU and graphics performance is clearly better. Geekbench scored 1944 and 8927 for single and multi core CPU performance on the M2. For the M1 the figures were 1745 and 7750. Machine learning scores were 203.9 images per second on the M2 and 178.3 on the M1.
OpenGL graphics scores were 27434 (M2) and 19845 (M1). The M2 won in all these categories.
The really interesting component is the step-up in the M2 Pro’s neural engine. Apple says it manages 15.8 trillion operations per second, 40 per cent more than the M1.
The M2 Pro and its neural engine enhance some clever AI in software. Adobe Photoshop can identify shapes and objects in images and automatically enhance them in seconds. It took a couple of seconds for the landscape mixer neural filter in Photoshop to add winter effects to summertime shots. It would normally take me minutes to do this manually.
The 2020 Pro could perform these transformations too, but they took longer.
I conducted our usual battery test, playing a continuous loop of video at 50 per cent brightness on both laptops.
The 2020 M1 Pro went 16 hours 27 minutes on a single charge whereas the M2 lasted 19 hours 23 minutes. You can expect shorter battery life if your video editing generates heat and causes the fan to speed up.
In the end, the 2022 MacBook Pro with the M2 chip offers better all around performance than its predecessor and you get a more powerful machine for the same price. Further, the entry level model is only $100 more than the MacBook Air M2.
