Apple MacBook Pro Benchmarking Suggests A Promising macOS Laptop

Updated Dec 5th: article originally posted December 3rd

If there’s one thing that Apple fans love, it’s more power. New details on next year’s 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models suggest this is precisely what they will get. That fascination with power means the best choice is to wait for the 2023 MacBooks, but for everyone else, this quest for performance can be safely ignored… there are better choices.

Update: Monday December 5th: More details on the new MacBook Pro laptops for 2023 leaked over the weekend, and Apple is pushing the potential of the 14-inch and 16-inch macOS laptops as hard as possible. Naturally, Tim Cook and his team will be pushing up the memory and storage on the hardware, but new reports show just how much the memory will be pushed. Hartley Charlton reports:

“it is possible that the next MacBook Pro models could be equipped with Samsung’s latest LPDDR5X RAM, which would provide up to 33 percent increased memory bandwidth and up to 20 percent less power consumption. This would result in a significant specification boost of up to 300 GB/s memory bandwidth for the ‌M2‌ Pro and up to 600 GB/s for the ‌M2‌ Max.”

To put that into context, the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops are running Samsung’s LPDDR5 RAM modules. On the M1 Pro models, that allows for up to 200 GB/s or bandwidth into the memory, while the larger M1 Max model reaches 400 GB/S.

With Samsung’s new RAM chipsets offering speeds up to 600 GB/s, it’s clear that Apple could significantly increase data throughput with the latest technology. Couple that with the improved performance from the M2 family of chips and the presumptively named M2 Pro and M2 Max chipsets, those looking for as much performance as possible – no matter the cost – should be skipping over any of the current MacBook Pro laptops in favor of the 2023 models.

What can we expect from these new overpowered laptops? The latest details come from the always-dependable Geekbench. Picked up by industrious Apple commenter @ShrimpApplePro, the benchmarks show a step up in capability but not the quantum leap we saw with Apple’s move away from Intel’s x86 platform to the exclusive ARM-based Apple Silicon platform. William Gallagher reports:

“…the Geekbench figures include details of the device’s configuration. As reported, the device features 96GB RAM, which is more than a current MacBook Pro can offer, but less than the Mac Studio. The CPU is listed as being “Apple M2 Max,” and the data includes that it’s one 12-core processor running at 3.54 GHz. The single-core score is 1853, and the multi-core score is 13855.”

As with any discussion around benchmarks, there’s no guarantee which device is being measured and how far down the development path the device is; this could be a new Mac Studio instead of the MacBook Pro M2 Max, although there’s a lot of confidence that the latter is the case.

A quick crunch on the numbers shows a broadly twenty percent increase in performance over the M1 Max; curiously, that’s the same game seen in the MacBook Air between the M1 and M2-based laptops.

Remember that the M1 Max (and the lower-tiered M1 Pro) were some of the most powerful laptop chipsets when they were launched. That the M2 Max is building on that success means that those looking for a powerful machine should be considering these updated MacBook Pro laptops, which are expected to arrive near the end of Q1 2023.

And these scores are for a single core in the CPU. What happens when Apple pushes up the core count to improve multi-tasking performance? Uplifting the GPU? Or improving the speed of other components in the hardware?

For the average consumer looking for a laptop that just works, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops with the uprated M1 chips were already seen as offering an excess of unnecessary power. The next generation is going to step that up once more. That will make them even more attractive to developers and heavy-duty creatives. It’s also going to tempt those in the geekerati that want “the laptop with the biggest number”, but for those who need a cost-effective laptop for day-to-day use, then the MacBook Air portfolio remains the best choice that balances price and potential.

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