Apple unveils host of Macs including new MacBook Pro with faster M2 chips

Apple has unveiled a host of new Macs, with what it says are dramatically faster new chips.

All of the new computers are powered by the new M2 Pro and M2 Max, high-end versions of the M2 chip that were first revealed in laptops last summer.

The new chips come in a variety of new computers: a 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro, and new Mac Mini. All of those computers keep the same external design as before, but Apple promises they are much faster on the inside.

It is the first time that Apple’s Mac Mini has included the higher-end, “professional” versions of Apple’s chips, since it could previously only include the normal M1. It was one of the first computers to receive that M1 chip – the first of Apple’s processors to be designed in house – but has gone unchanged since that happened in 2020.

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999, or £2,149, and the larger 16-inch model starts at $2,499 or $2,699. The Mac Mini with the normal M2 starts at $599 or £649, and the one with the M2 Pro costs $1,299 or £1,399.

All of them are available to order today and will arrive with customers and in shops next week.

The old versions of the computers have been removed from sale. That includes the Mac Mini that included the Intel chips that powered Macs before Apple introduced its own processors – leaving the Mac Pro as the only computer to keep that technology.

Apple claimed that the new M2 Pro is 40 per cent faster at Photoshop image processing than the the MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro inside of it, and it is 25 per cent faster at compiling new code in Xcode. Graphic speeds are up to 30 per cent faster, it said.

But Apple gave little more precise details about how much faster the new computers are than their predecessors. It announced the new computers in a press release, rather than a live event.

Apple did however post a video to its website, which looked as if it had been created for one of its full announcement events. Reports have suggested that Apple had been planning a January event to reveal its widely-rumoured augmented reality glasses – and the Mac-focused video may have been created for that.

The new chips do not appear to offer additional features or a new design when compared with both the M2 from last year and the M1 Pro and Max chips that first arrived in the larger versions of the MacBook Pro when they were unveiled in October 2021.

Instead, Apple indicated that the new chips were intended to build on that foundation but increase the performance. Taken together, the improvements mean that the new chips are “the world’s most powerful and power-efficient chip for a pro laptop”, Apple said, though it gave little information on how it had come to that conclusion.

Source: finance.yahoo.com