Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops have leaned into performance in a big way, with the M2 Pro and M2 Max chipsets offering more power than any previous Apple laptop. But there is another area where Tim Cook and his team have turned up the speed.
Apple MacBook Pro (Early 2023)
Details on the faster components have been confirmed by the team at MacWorld, who had early access to the MacBook Pro for their review. Testing a 16-inch MacBook Pro, running the M2 chipset on a machine with 2TV of storage, using the Blackmagic disk benchmarking software, it found that the write speed is improved, although there’s a tiny drop in the read speed.
“Interestingly, the 2TB SSD in our review unit posted a read score that was 7 percent slower than the 1TB SSD in the 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro that we tested–that’s small enough to be barely noticeable. The M2 Pro’s SSD more than doubled the performance of the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro, which we tested with a 1TB SSD.”
There were comparable performance results with an M2 Max-equipped MacBook Pro, suggesting this benefit will be found across the board on the laptop specs.
The latter is important because of Apple’s decision to hobble the M2-equipped MacBook Air with slower read and write speeds due to the configuration of the SSD. Rather than use two smaller capacity SSDs (such as two 128 GB chipsets for a total of 256 GB of storage), Apple switched to a single SSD block.. No doubt there were savings on the bill of materials, but it reduced the read and write speeds by up to fifty percent.
Looking at the pre-release reviews, with the caveat that not all configurations of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro have been checked, it looks like Apple has decided that performance is more important for these macOS laptops. That matches up with the other subtle indicators that these professional MacBook Pro machines would be better regarded as portable workstations rather than top-of-the-line laptops.
Now read the other options Apple has instead of its new MacBook Pro laptops…
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