Apple MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and Max chips now official

Apple has officially brought its M2 Pro and M2 Max chips to its new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. You can expect 40 percent faster performance and better battery life. Apple will start shipping these new laptops next week. 

The M2 Pro is the new entry-level processor, with either 10- or 12-core CPUs. You can expect up to a 20 percent performance boost over the 10-core M1 Pro. Its GPU goes up from 16 to 19 cores, promising improved processing for content creation apps like Photoshop.

Meanwhile, the M2 Max boosts GPU cores further from 34 to 38 compared to the M1 Max. And it supports up to a whopping 96GB of fast unified memory. Its processing graphic speeds are up to 30 percent higher than the M1 Max chip, which should let it breeze through tasks like visual effects and machine learning.

These new chips also feature Apple's next-generation 16-core Neural Engine, which is up to 40 percent faster. The M2 Pro gets a new media engine with hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encode and decode modes. It supports playback of multiple 4K and 8K ProRes video streams while being power efficient. The Max doubles that video encode and ProRes engines.

You might be more excited to hear about the battery improvements, though. As these MacBook Pro models can now run up to 22 hours, which Apple says is the longest ever for a Mac. These laptops now also support WiFi 6E and an HDMI port that can handle 8K up to 60Hz and 4K up to 24Hz. Then it retains the rest of the previous generation specs. Pricing starts at $2,599 for the 14-inch model and $3,199 for the 16-inch.

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