Apple M2 MacBook Pro - Another Reason To Think Twice Before Buying
In our article, Thinking Of Buying The M2 MacBook Pro? Read This First, we outlined a number of reasons why you should think carefully about buying an M2-powered 13-inch MacBook Pro. Now that reviewers are getting their hands on them and testing them a new reason to be cautious about this new M2 MBP has come to light. We have the details…
Reasons To Be Cautious - Part 1
Lacking In Ports - One of the challenges of the 1st generation of M1-powered computers was the limited number of ports. Because the M2 MacBook Pro is the same design as the 1st generation M1-powered MacBook Pro, with just 2 Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 ports and a headphone socket. You also have to charge your laptop using one of the two Thunderbolt ports so in reality you only have one port, so some kind of Dock becomes essential.
It Is An Older Design And Display - The 13-inch MacBook Pro design predates the M1-powered model and although it is a classic design, Apple shook things up with the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops, which means the M1 and M2 13” MacBook Pro design is long in the tooth to say the least, and this is emphasised when you put it up against the new M2 MacBook Air.
The Camera Is Still 720p - Although for audio work, this is less of an issue, because the M2 MBP uses the same design as the 1st gen M1 MBP, the M2 version comes with a 720p FaceTime HD camera. as with other features we have looked at the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops, as well as the M2 MacBook Air, all come with a 1080p sensor in the FaceTime camera.
Audio Features - When it comes to audio features, the new M2-powered MacBook Pro doesn’t come with the four-speaker sound system that you will find in the M2 MacBook Air, however, the M2 MBP does come with support for Apple’s Spatial Audio when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos including dynamic head tracking when using Apple’s AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, which it’s M1-powered predecessor didn’t have.
Who Wants A MacBook With A Touch Bar? - The M2 MacBook Pro becomes the only Apple laptop that retains the Touch Bar. Consequently, this is likely to be the last Apple laptop that comes with the Touch Bar. Now, this may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on where you stand on the usefulness, or not, of the Touchbar.
The MacBook Air Is The Same Price - All in all the new M2-powered MacBook Air looks the better bet. It is a new design taking on board a number of the features that the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops have. It has a MagSafe 3 charging port plus 2 Thunderbolt ports, it has a larger 13.6” Liquid Retina display with True Tone, it has a 1080p FaceTime camera, it has a fast charge option, charging up to 50% capacity in 30 minutes and it has a new keyboard design all for the same price as the M2 MBP.
Learn more - If you want to know more about these factors then read the full article Thinking Of Buying The M2 MacBook Pro? Read This First for all the details.
Reasons To Be Cautious - Part 2
It would appear that there is definitely an issue with the base model with a 256GD SSD. Two Youtubers have tested the cheapest M2 MacBook Pro, which comes with 8GB of unified memory and a 256GD SSD and found that the SSD is much slower than the SSD with the same capacity on the original M1 13-inch MacBook Pro.
00:00 M2 MacBook Pro SSD Issue
00:38 SSD Speed Differences
01:16 M2 MacBook Pro Teardown
02:01 What Does This Mean?
03:10 Why Slow SSDs Might Be Bad
06:07 Why Did Apple Do This?
00:00 M1 vs M2 MacBook Pro - ULTIMATE COMPARISON!
01:09 Blackmagic SSD Speed Test
02:33 Speaker Comparison
03:08 Webcam & Mic Comparison
03:23 Full Teardown/Internal Differences
05:41 Geekbench 5 CPU
06:44 Speedomiter 2.0 Test
07:20 Geekbench 5 Metal GPU
07:53 3DMark Wild Life Extreme
08:15 Cinebench R23 + Thermals
11:02 Xcode Programming Benchmark
11:23 Logic Pro Music Production
12:06 Lightroom Classic Photo Editing
13:45 Affinity Photo GPU & CPU
14:20 Photoshop Photo Editing
15:14 Blender 3D Rendering
16:01 4K HEVC Video Editing
17:42 ProRes Video Editing
19:27 Battery Life Comparison
As you can see it’s not a small difference, we are looking at around 50% lower read speeds and 30% lower write speeds. When Max Tech took the machine apart they found out why. The 256GB SSD comprises of one 256GB NAND flash storage chip. The previous M1 model’s 256GB SSD is made up of two 128GB SSDs and the key here is that two chips performing read/write functions are faster than a single chip doing the same thing.
What makes this worse is that when an Apple Silicon-powered computer runs out of unified memory, it effectively uses the SSD as what we used to call virtual memory and is now called a swapfile. The problem is that if the SSD is slower then it takes longer for the SSD to do the swapfile and that will impact the computer’s overall performance.
Why Has Apple Done This?
It’s not exactly clear and at the time of writing Apple hasn’t commented, however, there are a couple of reasons, one might be that the single 256GB chip might be slightly cheaper, and the second reason may be the lack of availability of 128GD flash storage chips, forcing Apple to use 256GB chips. If so Apple may quietly swap the chips used in the 256GB SSD model to two 128GB chips in future production cycles.
UPDATE: This Affects The 256GB M2 MacBook Air Too
Now that the M2 MacBook Air has been released, it turns out that the M2 MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD has the same single 256GB flash storage chip as the M2 MacBook Pro.
Apple has released an announcement saying…
“Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster.”
The News Isn’t All Bad
What is interesting is that the mainstream reviewers have been testing higher-speed M2 MacBook Pro computers. For example, Macworld’s review machine had a 1TB drive, which they understand is made up of two 512GB chips. So our advice is that if you do want to buy an M2-powered MacBook pro or 13.6-inch MacBook Air once you can order them, is to buy a machine with a larger SSD.