It's very interesting to think the processor releases were holding back the Mac for so long. They are on the cusp on turning Macs into annual upgrades - with meaningful performance upgrades tied to the OS, just like they've done for a decade with the A series / iOS releases.<p>This is firing on all cylinders. The organizational structure and performance is a marvel for this.
Why does the 13" Pro have a 720p camera and the Air have a 1080p? Seriously, why is Apple still putting in 720p cameras? This has to be a mistake, right?<p>Edit: Also the pro is missing the magsafe charger. Are they phasing out the 13" pro?<p>Pro: <a href="https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/</a><p>Air: <a href="https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/</a>
I got an M1 Macbook Pro, and yeah, the processor is fast and cool and all that, but the most absolutely wonderful thing about it by far is that there's no touchbar!
"M2 takes the industry-leading performance per watt of M1 even further with an 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine"<p>18% faster at the same performance per watt is a nice increase. Interesting to see if this will ever make it to their desktop computers.
I'm not surprised they are keeping the M1 Air alive. That thing is a great price/performance combo in a very light and portable wrapper. It's been $850-$900 multiple times at Costco, Bestbuy or Microcenter.<p>Also, the first computer where getting the upgraded hard drive (512GB or 1TB) really helps with the low ram because of the integration bus they have with the drive for swap. It's fast.
Ouch, that MacBook Pro 13" chassis makes me hurt. The air actually has a better body, that's disappointing. The display size, magsafe and function keys are all better on Air but it doesn't have a fan for sustained performance :'(
I can't help but wonder what Microsoft's answer to Apple Silicon will be going forward. They don't really make hardware, but selling Windows laptops gets harder and harder the further Apple gets ahead. It seems inevitable that there needs to be some ARM-based Windows laptops to compete in perf/watt to the M1/M2 but I don't know what company can provide an ARM chip that competes with Apple at this point.
I like how Apple is pushing forward the computing industry to have SOC's.
However, in as much how fast an m1, m2 or the Alder lake processors are. the problem, lies in 45% in the HN demographic that's shipping dog slow software.
whether creating OS code at Microsoft, Linux or Chrome. then the rest of the web dev's.
Hopefully the industry can transition to SOC's with documented API's so we can skip the multi-layers of software i.e Firmware -> OS -> Driver's -> User Land Software to Just Hardware -> Thin OS (unikernel like) -> User land software
"<i>Compared with the latest 10-core PC laptop chip, the CPU in M2 provides nearly twice the performance at the same power level</i>"<p>"<i>compared to the latest 12-core PC laptop chip [...] M2 provides nearly 90 percent of the peak performance</i>"<p>That doesn't make sense. Twice the performance of a 10-core Intel CPU, but only 90% of the performance of a 12-core? This implies Intel more than doubles performance when going from 10 to 12 cores. Reading the footnotes, the 10- and 12-core Intel CPUs that Apple used for benchmarking are the i7-1255U and i7-1260P which have respectively 2P+8E and 4P+8E cores (performant and efficient cores). So the second Intel CPU actually has twice the number of performant cores than the first.<p>This means the benchmark mostly depends on performant cores and nearly doesn't use or doesn't depend on efficient cores. If so, that's a rather useless benchmark for evaluating the CPU as a whole (P and E cores.)<p>But what this also means is that Apple is being sneaky. The M2 has 4P + 4E cores (not revealed in the press release, but we can tell from the die shot). Thus comparing it to an Intel CPU with only 2P cores (i7-1255U) is guaranteed to make the M2 look better as the benchmark doesn't use E cores (see above.)<p>What I'd love to see is the M2 put up against a Zen 3 or 3+ mobile CPU like the Ryzen 7 6800U (15–28 W) which straight up has 8 regular ("performant") cores.
One note, I used the images of the chips themselves and the M2 chip is physically bigger than the M1 chip by 21.8%, but the article claims a 25% increase in transistors. So there's only an actual 3% increase (1.25 / 1.218) in the transistor density with this new process. Most of the advancement is presumably in the form of better heat transfer and cheaper silicon per unit area.
Can anyone fathom how a M2 MBP 13inch would stack up against the current M1Pro MBP 14-16inch? This whole CPU/GPU thing is hard to make out. An 8core M2 which has 12% more oomph then an M1 makes it equivalent to a 8.96core M1? What's wrong with clock speed...
Now that we have validation that Apple is sticking with a numeric naming convention, I wonder how they will handle the upcoming naming clash with the M7 through M12 motion coprocessors used in the A-series chips.
I see a lot of hype around the AI cores. What do regular users use it for? Only thing I can think of is accelerating writing recognition / face-auth stuff.
Funny how I skim the page for eight seconds, see a ton of marketing fluff, and immediately back out and come to the comments section here for real info.
That's a year and seven months since M1 was released, so M3 is expected ? Jan. 2024? It'd be pretty rare for a January release, expect instead probably November 2023 or March 2024.<p>There's a joke here somewhere... all those poor M2 suckers when M3 is about to be released. Something like that.
I was hoping to the long-awaited Reality Glasses this keynote. Something like a M2 on each lens could drive a 90 fps 2K display. The libraries are hinting at howAR/VR will be done-Metal-3, lidar, etc.
Does this mean that a M2 Max could do 128gb RAM? That opens up some use cases beyond the 64gb. My world has pretty much no improvement between 32gb and 128gb, but I'm currently on a 64gb machine.
I'd still buy the 14" Pro for the more ports, slower chip for more $ or not.<p>And real function keys instead of a touchbar?<p>They seem to be making weirdly inconsistent choices in the product line.<p>I thought they were going to be getting rid of the touchbar (and maybe adding more ports?) and they were only still in the legacy 13" because it was legacy. But apparently they mean to indefinitely have a 13" Pro with a touchbar and a 14" Pro (actually the same size device, just less bezel, I think?) with function keys?<p>And the new M2 Air has a magsafe power connector (like the M1 14" and 16" Pro)... but the new M2 13" Pro does not? Why?
Someone please explain to me why I need so much power. Can't even run ML on these. More browser tabs?<p>I miss my 100Mhz IBM PC with 16 MBs of RAM & Visual Studio.
0n the return on MagSafe: they should have let Jony "Form over Function" Ive go much sooner. Maybe we'd still have audio jacks on iPhones.
It was super interesting for me to see Apple not directly compare M2 to M1 in any of the graphs, why not directly tell us how much better it is than its predecessor as opposed to PC Laptop peers ?