Apple’s all-new MacBook Air design got the most attention at WWDC last week, but you won’t be able to buy it until next month. Meanwhile, Apple’s other less interesting M2 laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, will be available for pre-order starting Friday, June 17, the company announced today. The laptop will start shipping (and appear in Apple stores) on June 24th.
The laptop’s main upgrade is the M2 chip, which Apple says delivers 18% faster CPU performance and up to 35% faster GPU performance than the M1 (in the 10-core GPU version). The M2 also features enhanced video encoding and decoding capabilities with the ProRes video engine and support for decoding multiple 4K and 8K video streams.
The M2 also supports up to 24GB of storage, compared to 16GB for the M1. But like the M1, the M2 chip supports a maximum of two displays – an internal laptop screen and one external monitor with resolutions up to 6K. If you need to connect multiple monitors to your Mac, you’ll need the M1 Pro and Max chips in the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
With the exception of the M2, the new MacBook Pro is identical to the old one. It has a notch-less 13.3-inch Retina display, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, and a scissor-switch keyboard with Touch ID fingerprint scanner and Touch Bar. It remains Apple’s last Touch Bar MacBook, as the feature was never included on the MacBook Air and was removed from the larger MacBook Pros last year.
While the MacBook Air outperforms the new Pro in terms of screen size, port selection, and weight, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to buy the 13-inch Pro instead. The MacBook Air has a fanless design, while the 13-inch Pro includes a fan to cool the M2 chip. Apple’s silicon usually performs well without a fan, but for long-term heavy workloads like video rendering or encoding, the M1 Air slows down over time to avoid overheating while the M1 Pro can keep running at top speed. The difference may be even more pronounced for the larger, faster M2.
The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,299 for the 10-core GPU, 8GB RAM, and 256GB storage version.