The new 14-inch M2 Max MacBookPro lives up to the promise of more performance, but not without a trade-off.
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch MSRP $4,099.00 Score Details DT Editors' Choice “The M2 Max MacBook Pro runs hotter, but delivers better performance and battery life too.” Pros Cons The 14-inch model is the Goldilocks MacBook Pro. For many, the 13-inch MacBook Pro isn’t powerful enough. It only uses the M2 chip, meaning it’s lacking in the graphics department. Meanwhile, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is quite powerful, but its size can be off-putting.
Ports are another strong suit for the 14-inch MacBook Pro. And while the ports themselves haven’t changed, Apple has updated the connectivity up to the latest standards. The MagSafe 3 charging, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and full-size SD card slot are still here, but the HDMI port has been bumped to HDMI 2.1. Wireless connectivity is also now at Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E, which is what you’ll find in most Windows laptops coming out this year too.
My own review unit, however, came with 2TB of storage, and it was blazing fast, so I can’t complain. It still frustrates me that Apple won’t be more transparent, though. Big graphics improvement The beefy new GPU is the biggest change, of course. That’s always been the promise of the Pro and Max chips, despite the fact that they’re combined in a single package. And this time around, the core count has gone up quite a bit, from 32 cores to 38 cores. Of course, upgrading from the M1 Pro the M2 Pro only bumps you up an extra three GPU cores, meaning the biggest leap will be in the maxed-out configurations — which is exactly what my unit was.
The RTX 40-series cards are coming this year, though, and will bring more 14-inch laptops with up to RTX 4090s in them. We’ll have to wait and see how those compare, but for now, Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro is the most powerful in its class. Of course, compared to the average Windows laptop that the 14-inch MacBook Pro competes against, the M2 Max is still a supremely cool and efficient chip. Competitors like the Razer Blade 14, Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X, even the Dell XPS 15 — all run much louder than the MacBook Pro, and even get much hotter to the touch.
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