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The M2 MBP makes absolutely no sense
- Thread starter rm5
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Sometimes this can be a strategy.
The existance of M2 Macbook Pro is to show people that the M2 Macbook Air is a bargain.
The existance of M2 Macbook Pro is to show people that the M2 Macbook Air is a bargain.
The clock speed isn't any faster if you have an Ultra chip. It makes a lot of sense in Ax chip machines to buy the cheapest one that fills your needs, but the marketing/product offerings kind of dresses it up in a way that makes you naturally gravitate toward buying more than you need.
It was presented as the step child that no one wants in the family....
It has its merits but definitely feels like the black sheep of the lineup. It's likely a stay of execution for the form factor until the newer chassis gets M2/Pro/Max/Ultra/Über/Beyond/Quantum et cetera.
Only reason I can think of to buy one is if you absolutely must have an actively cooled M2...now.
Only reason I can think of to buy one is if you absolutely must have an actively cooled M2...now.
I think #1 is supply chain optimization means Apple can produce these for cheap. There's probably a big stock of parts for the 13" pro, or at least very efficient/established production processes for these. This is an especially big deal these days with supply chain issues.
But consumer benefits I see are...
#2 - The fan. It is a big deal if you do work that requires sustained performance. My Macbook Air runs great, but it throttles when encoding really long videos, opening unreal engine projects to compile thousands of shaders, or doing anything that maxes out all CPUs for more than a few minutes.
#3 - The touch bar. Easy to forget that there are people who REALLY like it and are sad to see it go.
and #4 a bunch of little stuff like slightly more ports, slightly better battery life..
Enterprise. They buy them by truckload.
Look: it says “Pro”, it costs half of 14” MBp (imagine the bulk purchase discounts), and it’s available right now while a 14” says “9 weeks delivery”.
The company I work in still buys 13” Intel MacBooks that barely run Google Meet from external screen; M2 would be an insane upgrade.
Look: it says “Pro”, it costs half of 14” MBp (imagine the bulk purchase discounts), and it’s available right now while a 14” says “9 weeks delivery”.
The company I work in still buys 13” Intel MacBooks that barely run Google Meet from external screen; M2 would be an insane upgrade.
2020 13” Macbook Pro with 10-gen i5, runs out of battery after 1 hour of video call. Either this or Lenovo with Windows; we the cool software company give our employee the choice.
I hear about this. But in all my years I've never come across any company that uses Macs in the kind of bulk purchase enterprise way I see PCs used. Gotta be mostly a US thing. In the UK, Government contractors delivering IT to all the Government Departments including the MOD, DWP and NHS are probably by far the biggest deployers of enterprise computers, and it's wall to wall PCs. Hundreds of thousands of them. Cue of course that one person who's bound to say "My company has 200 iMacs", but they're the exception.
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I don’t know but we get them new. Maybe a contract for X laptops over Y years. I think they were afraid the IT infrastructure will have problems with M1 compatibility.
It sounds stupid for people who know about Apple computers, but there is a huge market for cheap MacBook Pros that does not care about the design, and where getting an M2 is good.
It was also a mediocre machine from the start, with an eye-straining 1280x800 panel, a defective-by-design SATA cable, and performance that was barely tolerable when new.
It actually makes less than zero sense. We're in the negatives here for comprehensibility. They changed nothing except the chip. They might as well just remove it from the lineup at this point. The Air for every day tasks and the occasional demanding tasks and the Pros for hardcore professional work. They could streamline their Macs at this point. The 13" MBP is in a very weird place that doesn't quite fit into the lineup.
Or it could just come down to them trying to get rid of their extra MBP inventory.
Or it could just come down to them trying to get rid of their extra MBP inventory.
If fits in the lineup as a cheaper alternative to the 14" M1 Pro MBP...
Based on how they did things in the Intel days, the lineup SHOULD be the 13.5" MBA, a 14" M2 MBP that looks like the M1 Pro MBP but has two ports instead of four and an M2 instead of M1 Pro, then the M1 Pro MBP, etc. But if, say, they can't get enough of the screens for the 14" MBP but their supplier can make plenty of the older 13" screens, then this lets them increase their sales volume.
The 14"/16" MBPs are largely massively backordered everywhere, no? Apple.ca is telling me Aug. 11. My guess is that there is one component, whether it's screens, cameras or anything else, that's the bottleneck in production of those. And whatever that component is, it's not used in the 13" MBP.
It's not though. There's nothing about this that's better than the M2 Air. It's not a better deal and it's also more expensive. It's unneeded.
Reviewers noticed throttling anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes after moderate workloads. It all depends on the type of work.
It‘s actively cooled so more likely to be suited to many hours of contiguous heavy load with less throttling. Otherwise yes, it’s a bit of an oddball.
Mark Gurman reported the other day that a 12” MacBook was in the works for late 2023. When it was subsequently followed by a tweet that this 12” model was going to be a MacBook Pro model à la PowerBook G4, it made me wonder if this is what Apple’s intending to replace the dated 13” MacBook Pro design with. Thoughts?