Apple’s 2023 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros are here, and they look mostly the same as the 2021 models. The insides, though, are anything but. This generation of Apple powerhouses introduces the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, finally giving professionals an M2 MacBook Pro that is both performant and not using a design from last decade.
But reusing 2021’s design still leaves this generation of Pros feeling safe. Basic premium features like OLED and touchscreens still aren’t here, unlike on PCs, and there’s got to be a better way to get a good webcam on your $2,000+ laptop than a notch.
The new internals are powerful, often enough to cut the time to complete certain intensive tasks in half. They’re a great reason to buy this laptop if you don’t yet have a Pro or you work in video. For everyone else, it’s hard to justify the upgrade.
Apple's latest 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros are powerful but will be hard for most to justify.
Apple's latest 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros are powerful but will be hard for most to justify.
The review unit Apple sent us for this writeup wasn’t the highest available spec, but still high performing and expensive. We got the MacBook Pro 16 inch with a 12-core CPU, 19-core GPU M2 Pro chip, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. That’ll run you $3,500, but you can lower this model down to $2,700 or even $2,500 by dropping the amount of RAM and storage included with it.
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Alternatively, you can spend that $3,500 to get a 16 inch model with the 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU M2 Max chip. You’ll also get 32GB of RAM for that much, plus 1TB of storage. If you want to get a ludicrous 96GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, you’ll be spending $6,500.
The new M2 Pro and Max chips are also in 2023’s 14 inch MacBook Pros, which start at $2,000 for an M2 Pro with a 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU. The 14 inch MacBook Pros top out at $6,300 for an M2 Max chip with a 12 core CPU and 30-core GPU, plus 96GB of RAM and 8TB of storage. But you can also get a lower-specced M2 Max model starting at $3,100.
All configurations come with a variable refresh rate mini-LED “Liquid Retina XDR” display that’s capable of playing HDR content and hitting 120Hz. The display’s resolution is slightly sub-4K, at 3,456 x 2,234.
If all those numbers sound confusing to you, just know that you’ll probably be fine with 16 to 32GB of RAM, unless your work specifically demands more. Your storage needs will depend on how much you like to keep on your laptop vs the cloud or an external storage device. 1TB will likely serve most just fine.
In 2021, when fashion forward tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee reviewed the last generation of 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros, he promised that he’d wear socks and sandals for a day if the next generation of 14 and 16 inches still had a notch. It’s not quite the most extreme “I’ll eat my hat” promise we’ve seen, but I look forward to seeing MKBHD cosplay Linus Tech Tips in his next video, because the notch is still here.
And the notch is still fine. Better here than on the MacBook Air, actually, as the larger screen combines with the thin bezels to help it fade away into the background when you’re not looking at it. That said, the notch’s reason for being there is questionable. It’s only there to integrate the facetime sensor into the laptop’s internals, which gives the webcam some extra lighting smarts. But with continuity camera now allowing iPhones to act as webcams, and Lenovo developing solutions like its swappable Magic Bay webcam add-ons, maybe I should be the one promising to make a bold fashion choice if the notch is still there on the next line of Pros.
The notch isn’t the only thing that’s still there. This year’s MacBook Pros actually have the exact same overall design as 2021’s, with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a Magsafe charging port on the left side along with an SD card reader, HDMI port, and additional Thunderbolt 4 port on the right side.
It’s an acceptable layout for a productivity machine, and I praised it when an iteration of it came to the M2 MacBook Air last year. But while the port selection is more generous than we’d gotten used to before Mac redesigned the Pro line two years ago, the lack of USB-A ports holds the laptop back when it comes to gaming, an arena where Apple keeps insisting it’s a legitimate competitor. To test the Apple silicon native port of Resident Evil village on this MacBook, I had to plug in a USB-C hub just to get my mouse working. Not a big ask, but not strictly a “native” experience, either. In a similar vein, a DisplayPort connection would also help gamers more easily connect some high resolution and high refresh rate external monitors.
I’d also like to see Apple experiment with additional colorways for the Pro line. As usual, you can get this year’s models in either silver or “space gray,” aka “light gray” and “dark gray,” and it’s starting to get a little boring. Last year’s Air models introduced gold and navy blue colorways to the Air line, and it’s about time Apple’s most dedicated customers got access to the same kind of variety.
Unlike the M2 MacBook Air, which got a Pro-like redesign with its new generation, the biggest change to the new 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros is that new chip. It makes the laptop a bit of a hard sell to most, since the M1 Pro was already so impressive. This is a more incremental change than the M1 series, but given the disappointment that was the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2, the M2 Pro and Max powered MacBook Pros do fill a niche for power users. Finally, you can use Apple’s latest generation of in-house silicon with both a fan and a modern, sleek body.
The result is a laptop that clears most productivity benchmarks in roughly two and a half minutes. Transcoding a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake? Two minutes and 32 seconds. Rendering a BMW in Blender? Two minutes and 22 seconds, regardless of whether the laptop was using the CPU or GPU to do it.
For reference, the MacBook Pro with an M1 Max took 4 minutes and 50 seconds to transcode the same 4K file when we reviewed it in 2021. It also finished its CPU-based Blender render in three minutes and 21 seconds and its GPU-based one in 4 minutes and 56 seconds.
The MacBook Pro 13-inch, with a base M2, took four minutes and 3 seconds to transcode that 4K video, 4 minutes and 35 seconds to render Blender’s BMW file via the CPU, and four minutes and 36 seconds to do it via the GPU.
In many cases, then, this new laptop cuts the time to complete certain tasks by almost half, and in all cases, it can do them in the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee.
Granted, 4 minutes is also within the time frame it takes me to make a cup of coffee (I grind my beans fresh), so how much use you get out of the upgraded speed will be dependent on how often you’re performing these kinds of tasks and how big your files are. In a professional capacity, the time saved could translate to real dollars.For a non-Mac comparison, the Dell XPS 13 Plus, part of a series usually hailed for putting out Windows-based MacBook competitors, completed its Handbrake transcode in 9 minutes and 35 seconds. Not even close. Its Blender performance was roughly on par with the M1 Max MacBook Pro, taking four minutes and 27 seconds to complete a CPU-based render using its Intel Core i7-1280p chip.We also ran Geekbench, a synthetic benchmark measuring all around system performance, on the new MacBook Pro. Geekbench uses a score system rather than a time-based one, but was equally impressive. The 2023 MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro chip scored 1,965 on single-core tasks and 15,148 on multi-core ones. That’s a respectable result next to the 1,577 and 12,663 scores from the 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Max, and is well above the Dell XPS 13 Plus’ 1,714 and 9,947 results.
Gaming on Mac is still a bit of a pipe dream, mostly due to compatibility issues. Out-of-the-box, plenty of games simply don’t run on Mac, including benchmarking staples like the Far Cry series. 2023’s MacBook Pros don’t change that, but they do prove that the power needed for AAA gaming is there, if devs are willing to support Mac.
Without a doubt, the most impressive gaming experience I had on the 16 inch M2 Pro MacBook Pro was in its Apple silicon native Resident Evil Village port. Rather than running the x86 version of the game through an emulation layer (x86 being the CPU architecture most Windows machines use), Capcom worked with Apple to build this version of the game from the ground up for the M series.It’s been available since November of last year, which was well past our review for the last generation of 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, but the M2 Pro really lets it stretch its legs.Playing the game from the beginning up until reaching Elena’s house (about 2 to 3 hours while taking things slow and replaying action scenes with multiple different graphic presets), fan noise was never an issue and the laptop only ever got pleasantly warm to the touch. More impressively, even on graphics heavy presets, the framerate never dipped below 60.
I spent the majority of my time with the game using the “prioritize graphics” and “max” presets at a 1920 x 1200 resolution. I also tried the “prioritize performance” preset at the same resolution, but quickly found that the gains weren’t worth the (admittedly mild) hit to texture quality.
Regardless of preset, however, the results were a console-worthy experience, if closer to Xbox Series S than X. With “prioritize graphics” r Source: Gizmodo