Small refresh, Made for Ukraine??
The name M2 is a bit misleading. With only 10-20% performance boost and more cooling needed, a more appropriate name would be M1X.
The New MacBook arrived today to us and as expected the refresh is identical to last year’s model, apart from the changed APU.
The machine is great (just as it was last year). The only problem with this year’s Macbooks is that AMD/Intel laptops have leapfrogged Apple in CPU, GPU, and power efficiency. This year’s Macbook could jokingly be labeled “Last year’s CPU speed at this years pricepoint”.
We tested the 16-inch M2 Pro version with a 12-cores/12-thread CPU 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD (19-core GPU). The price for this configuration is a staggering 4149 Euro… Almost double the price of a laptop equipped with the twice as fast i9-13900HX and more than 10 times faster RTX 4060 GPU (2199 Euro).
So what do we have here? A laptop sacrificing top performance at the altar of great battery times for people who needs full-day use without a charger plugged in. Maybe this is the perfect laptop for Ukraine with a power grid down for 8 hours a day? With last year’s model, the lack of top speed didn’t feel too bad as Intel/AMD laptops were only like 50% or so faster (on CPU, and GPU power obviously was many times faster in windows-laptop-land than on MacBooks). This year the raw performance lag of Apple is so huge that users can even downclock and undervolt the competing Intel/AMD laptops by 50% to get long battery times and still match M1/M2s performance when being off the grid.
But most people in the modern world should really have no issue finding an outlet at that restaurant, desk, airport, bar, or even in-flight within a few hours’ time. So how many people really “need” more than 3-4 hours of battery time on a laptop in 2023? I mean most people have powerful phones and tablets that can do most tasks anyway unplugged all day long while relocating between places where laptop actually is used.
The biggest pluses of these MacBooks are really the same as the M1 version. The video-codec support in SW/HW is great and for video editing, these machines are great tools.
If you occasionally want to play games, the M2 still sucks as bad as the M1, with mediocre GPU power and poor game-software compatibility.
The hidden costs are also still driven by the lack of serviceability and upgradability so if you buy a 32GB version and find out you really need 64GB then you have to dish up 5000 euros for a new one, instead of buying a 32GB stick for 80 euro.
So to sum it up..
Most people will not care or even be able to tell these years’ Macbooks and the M1s apart, even when using them hands-on. The improvement is very modest and not very noticeable overall. Compared to competitors it feels like Apple is lagging behind more and more now.
And the Notch has still not been fixed.., We are just waiting for the next version of MacOS to introduce “dynamic island” <facepalm> ….
The good and the bad are really the same as the M1 models.
Good:
Great screen brightness (still no HDR1000 certification though)
The trackpad we all love
Great Battery-time
Good hw-support for video-codecs
MagSafe
MacOS
Bad:
Led artifacts and auras (not up to OLED quality) display
Problems with many expansions, eGPU, etc.
Sub-par performance of CPU
Sub-par GPU
Poor expandability and serviceability
Quality and performance do not match the high price.
Still the brainfart “Notch” F’ing up the screen and overall esthetics of these Macbooks.