Juha Saarinen: A look at the new Apple MacBook Pro

The Apple MacBook Pro.

OPINION:

I’m typing this on the new Apple MacBook Pro. It is pleasingly fast, with a great screen and able to handle anything I can throw at it thanks to the Apple Silicon M2 Pro chip, which is new for this year.

To be fair, the older MBP with the M1 Pro chip was also fast.

However, it would be difficult for hardware vendors to push users to upgrade computers without making them go faster. Umm, the computers, not the users. To some extent, this is driven by rising software demands. Computers are asked to handle increasingly large amounts of data and to do it quickly to boot.

Making chips go faster is incredibly complicated. You can’t just up the clock frequency, which in simple terms decides how often per second the transistors in a processor switch between 1 and 0.

Speeding up the clock uses more energy which is dissipated as heat, and it eats battery too. Both of which are bad for portable computers. You get some leeway by shrinking the manufacturing process for chips, and the M2 Pro is an incredibly fine 5 nanometres.

To make the chips go faster, hardware designers put lots of little processors on the main processor die. That’s confusing to write, so the little processors are called cores, and the name gives sad old tech journos like myself an opportunity to make blimey jokes.

The M2 Pro chip in the laptop sent to me has 12 general processing, 19 graphics and 16 neural engine cores. The 12 in the CPU are split between fast “Avalanche” cores for the heavy lifting, and energy-efficient “Blizzard” ones for when the laptop doesn’t need very much computing power. You can see them in action, kind of, by firing up the macOS Activity Monitor which has cool graphical usage tools.

But wait, there’s more! Once you have lots of quick cores, it becomes crucial that they can access data fast, over short distances to avoid delays that would otherwise leave the chip bits idling and not doing any work.

So, you stick as much of the computer as possible on the same piece of silicon. That’s called a System on a Chip or SoC. These make for better performance in small spaces, which is crucial for mobile devices.

The disadvantage is that you can’t upgrade with third-party components like you can with desktop PCs.

When you buy a new MacBook, you have to decide then and there how much memory (for example) you need. My review machine came with 16 gigabytes, but I think 32 GB is the sweet spot that will give your lappie a longer usable life. It’s expensive to specify more memory though: Apple asks for $700 for an additional 16 GB, which makes the already pricey MBP M2 Pro costing $4949 including GST even dearer.

Now, is it an anachronism then to have powerful individual computers when there’s the infinitely scalable cloud that never runs out of resources?

In a word, no. Cloud scalability and pay-as-you-go are great concepts (if managed carefully) but there’s not heaps you can do about the laws of physics. There will often be a situation when you need computing power close to the task at hand, to avoid the delay caused by servers being distant, and accessible via networks that are slow compared to local systems.

Being nearer to users is incidentally a key reason why the IT giants are building facilities in Auckland and why hybrid cloud which keeps part of the computing systems for organisations on premises are all the rage.

Packing sufficient computing power into laptops was a challenge in the past. Older workstation laptops were only just portable, being big, heavy and using heaps of energy so battery life was pitifully short.

Fix those drawbacks, and you get the MacBook Pro M2 which Apple is aiming at people working with video and special effects, music and developers. Basically, it’s people who juggle large amounts of data that’s created, edited and rendered in the shortest time possible who cast side-eyes on the M2 Pro MacBook, or even its way more expensive and highly-specced variants.

While not superlight or small with a 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR hi-res screen, the laptop is still easily portable. And it has ports! Three USB-C, one HDMI, SDXC slot for memory cards, 3.5 mm earphone jack and MagSafe 3 for fast 140 Watt charging.

Wifi 6E in recently freed-up 6 GigaHertz band is included, and it’s faaaast: 1.5 to 1.6 Gbps is really impressive over wireless.

The MacBook Pro isn’t as fast as the fastest desktops, but it’s not far off. Running tests - which geeks call benchmarks - show that the laptop can handle heavy duty tasks like video and special effects rendering with aplomb, and Xcode developers working with large projects that require lots of resources could honestly point to the M2 Pro computer and say it makes them more productive.

I was able to heat up the cores to just over 100C with the Cinebench 3D rendering benchmark, which made the fans come on. They are very quiet, almost imperceptibly so, which is testimony to how well Apple designs its thermal solution. In normal use and not cooking the computer with Cinebench, battery life was excellent, easily lasting a whole working day.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you might be thinking about upgrading from an older Mac; if it’s from an Intel based Mac, going to the Apple Silicon M2 Pro makes a huge difference.

With the earlier generation Apple Silicon laptops the performance increase is noticeable, but not the huge jump as it is when upgrading from Intel gear - the older processors remain plenty fast in 2023.

Apple gear sells for top dollar, and only you can decide if you’re pro enough to justify the expenditure. If you can justify it, the MacBook with the M2 Pro won’t disappoint, but make it a 32GB model and it’ll last you longer.