The New MacBook Pro
The last entry in Apple’s new M1 Mac lineup is naturally a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, which was introduced by Mac Product Line Manager Shruti Haldea.
As Haldea notes, the 13-inch MacBook Pro gets “way more pro” thanks to Apple’s M1 chip, with 2.8 times the performance of the 13-inch Intel MacBook Pro, and five times the GPU performance.
Much like the new MacBook Air, this makes it three times faster than the best-selling Windows laptop in its class, and it can apparently chew through 8K ProRes footage in full quality in DaVinci Resolve without dropping a single frame. Machine learning performance is also boosted by up to 11 times over the previous generation of MacBook Pro.
Unlike the MacBook Air, however, this one does include a fan, as part of an active cooling system to ensure that maximum performance can be maintained when whipping through demanding tasks, suggesting that despite featuring the same M1 chip as the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro should actually be faster — which is kind of what we’d expect.
Since it has room to pack in a larger battery — a 58.2Wh cell — it also gets slightly more impressive battery life than the new MacBook Air, and runs circles around the previous MacBook Pro, with up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing and 20 hours of video playback. Haldea notes that this means developers can compile four times as much code on a single charge.
The new MacBook Pro also differentiates itself from its lower-end siblings by adding new studio-quality microphones for better signal-to-noise ratios, especially in noisy environments, as well as the Touch Bar that’s been the staple of Apple’s MacBook Pro models for the past few years.
Sadly, if you were hoping for a FaceTime camera upgrade, you’ll be disappointed, as it looks like 1080p FaceTime cameras are still going to be the exclusive domain of Apple’s Intel-based 2020 iMac. However, it does gain the T2/M1 image signal processor improvements, which should offer sharper video with less grain, and better contrast and detail, particularly in lower light conditions.
The M1-equipped MacBook Pro includes two USB-C Thunderbolt and USB 4 ports that can drive Apple’s Pro Display XDR at full 6K resolution, although notably that’s two ports less than Apple’s higher-end Intel versions — which it’s also still selling for those who aren’t yet ready to make the jump to Apple Silicon.
The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,299 for a version with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, while the next standard configuration up offers a 512GB SSD for $1,499. Both models can be configured with up to 16GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, topping out at $2,299.
You can preorder the new MacBook Pro models starting today, and they’re expected to arrive in stores next week.