While the new MacBook Air dominated speculation about Apple hardware launches leading up to WWDC22, another powerful M2 machine slipped in a side door at the event. Against expectations, Apple rolled out the updated 13-inch MacBook Pro with the powerful new chipset.
“We’re so excited to bring our new M2 chip to the world’s two most popular laptops — the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The 13-inch MacBook Pro [features] incredible performance, ProRes acceleration, up to 24GB of memory, and up to 20 hours of battery life — making our most portable pro notebook even better.”
13-inch MacBook Pro refreshed with M2 chip and other enhancements
Cupertino said its most portable pro laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, keeps its compact form factor but gains capabilities with the M2 chip. It features an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
As an example, that makes working with RAW images in apps like Affinity Photo nearly 40 percent faster than the previous generation, and up to 3.4 times faster for users who are upgrading from a model without Apple silicon, the company said.
And the statistics on performance improvements for graphics-intensive games are similar.
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It also has 50 percent more memory bandwidth than the last version, which makes multitasking and working with large assets more fluid, Apple said.
Great video support and battery life
With support for ProRes encode and decode in the media engine of M2, users can play back up to 11 streams of 4K and up to two streams of 8K ProRes video. And they can convert their video projects to ProRes nearly 3x faster than before.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro delivers up to 20 hours of battery life during video playback, Apple said.
And, of course, both new laptops unveiled at WWDC22 will benefit from the upcoming macOS Ventura.
The updated laptop starts at $1,299 ($1,199 for education) and goes on sale in July.
