Are you able to hear it growling? The M2 Professional MacBook Professional, baring its sharp tooth, is a ravenous monster, devouring its present competitors with jaw-dropping efficiency. After our lab tester put the brand new 14-inch, M2 Professional-outfitted MacBook Professional via a collection of difficult assessments, we have been impressed with how the M2 Professional chip flexed its processing energy, delivering a Geekbench 5.5 rating that surpassed 15,000.
In different phrases, the brand new MacBook Professional is at present the highest canine amongst laptops, demolishing its rivals like a wrecking ball. (We’ll see if that holds true when the following wave of thirteenth Gen Intel CPU and AMD Ryzen 7000 Collection laptops swarm in.)
The M2 Professional MacBook Professional additionally crushed our video transcoding check. It downscaled a 4K video to 1080p in just a bit over 4 minutes. It takes the typical premium laptop computer over 9 minutes to finish the identical job.
Filled with a 19-core GPU, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional’s graphics efficiency is much more spectacular. Sure, we all know that Apple doesn’t care to make the MacBook Professional a gaming rig, however for kicks and giggles, we ran the Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, Very Excessive) benchmark on it. Lara Croft kicked ass quicker on the M2 Professional MacBook Professional. It delivered a rating of 49 frames per second; examine this to its predecessor’s fee (39 fps).
There’s no denying that the M2 Professional MacBook Professional is in a league of its personal, and as of this writing, it’s damn-near untouchable. Nevertheless, like a hater who’s secretly jealous of a starlet’s success, the devilish troll inside me needs to get tremendous nitpicky — virtually annoyingly so — to refute stans who imagine Apple can do no mistaken. So what imperfections did I uncover? Stick round to seek out out.
Its SSD velocity is downgraded
In keeping with its testing, 9to5Mac reported that the 2023 MacBook Professional suffered a efficiency drop in its SSD velocity. Once I took a have a look at the check outcomes we produced, we had the identical findings — the SSD velocity did take a success.
We don’t have an ideal apples-to-apples comparability as a result of the 14-inch M1 Professional MacBook Professional we examined in 2021 had a 1TB SSD whereas the current-gen unit we now have is filled with a 2TB SSD. However once we pitted each laptops towards one another, we found that the SSD contained in the M2 Professional-powered laptop computer is, certainly, slower than its predecessor.
On the Blackmagic Disk Velocity Check, the 14-inch M2 Professional MacBook Professional delivered a barely slower learn rating (5,293) in comparison with the M1 Professional MacBook Professional’s output (5,321). Why is that this occurring? Properly, as 9to5Mac identified, the brand new MacBook Professional has fewer NAND chips (however at the next capability): its predecessor has 4 whereas the current-gen mannequin has two. Consequently, the learn efficiency is a hair slower on the M2 Professional MacBook Professional, however not considerably so for my part.
9to5Mac additionally reported that the SSD contained in the M2 Professional MacBook Professional suffered a efficiency dip in relation to write efficiency, however we didn’t see this in our check outcomes.
| M2 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | M1 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | |
| SSD | 2TB | 1TB |
| Blackmagic learn rating | 5,293 | 5,321 |
| Blackmagic write rating | 6,168 | 5,377 |
The show isn’t brilliant sufficient
Apple claims that the M2 Professional MacBook Professional has a sustained brightness rating of 1,000 nits, and actually, I’m flabbergasted. The place did the Cupertino-based tech large get that quantity? In keeping with our check outcomes, the M2 MacBook Professional doesn’t get a tinge brighter than 465 nits — and that’s with adaptive brightness on or off.
A 465-nit panel actually isn’t that brilliant — its luminance is mid. After all, it’s not as terrible as a number of the sub-300 nit shows I’ve seen, however for those who’re sitting subsequent to a brilliant window at an airport, otherwise you’re working in your laptop computer outdoor throughout a sunny day, you’d want that Apple’s 1,000-nit brightness declare was true.
We additionally examined the M2 Professional MacBook Professional’s show for coloration accuracy utilizing the Delta-E benchmark. It delivered a rating of 0.20 (nearer to 0 is healthier), which is a tinge worse than its predecessor’s 0.19 rating. Sure, the distinction is negligible, however I believed it was price noting anyway.
| M2 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | M1 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | |
| Peak show nits | 465 | 483 |
| DCI-P3 coloration gamut | 82.9% | 77.6% |
| Delta-E (nearer to zero is healthier) | 0.20 | 0.19 |
Battery life took a slight hit
Let’s say a buddy hypes up a TV present and begs you to look at it. “The performing is unimaginable, the story is great, and the writing is to die for!” Nevertheless, after watching the primary episode with excessive expectations, you ended up feeling upset. It’s not that the TV present is terrible — removed from it! It’s simply that it doesn’t appear to warrant all that saccharine gushing. Had you watched the present with zero expectations, you’ll have cherished it, however since you anticipated a masterpiece, you ended up being disillusioned.
Equally, Apple set itself up for failure by claiming that its new MacBook Execs ship as much as 22 hours of battery life. I do know, I do know — “as much as” are the operative phrases right here, however nonetheless, I used to be anticipating mind-blowing battery runtimes throughout the board (not simply the 16-inch fashions). As such, I used to be upset to find that the M2 Professional MacBook Professional solely lasted 13 hours and 57 minutes in comparison with the M1 Professional MacBook Professional’s barely higher runtime (14 hours and 9 minutes).
That is solely a 12-minute setback, however once more, Apple set my expectations manner too excessive. Within the grand scheme of issues, almost 14 hours of battery life on a beastly laptop computer continues to be spectacular. Nevertheless, with “22 hours of battery life” etched into my mind, I used to be ready so as to add the M2 Professional MacBook Professional to a prime spot on our laptops with the very best battery life web page, maybe even knocking out the reigning champ: the 13-inch M2 MacBook Professional with over an 18-hour runtime.
Because it turned out, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional barely snuck into tenth place on our “laptops with the very best battery life” web page. Boo!
| M2 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | M1 Professional MacBook Professional (14-inch) | |
| Battery life | 13 hours and 56 minutes | 14 hours and eight minutes |
Backside line
Hey, it’s a praise to Apple if we now have to take out a proverbial magnifying glass to identify its imperfections. Like I stated on the outset, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional is a efficiency powerhouse with only a few flaws. Nevertheless, I wished to sift via the check outcomes with a high quality tooth comb to see what I may discover.
Probably the most egregious blemish is its “1,000-nit show” not even making it midway to being a 1,000-nit show. Nevertheless, for those who’re not an on-the-go skilled (and also you sit in an workplace with customary lighting), the M2 Professional MacBook Professional’s 465-nit show ought to be high quality.
Aside from that, sure, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional’s SSD learn efficiency and battery life took a slight hit, nevertheless it’s not vital sufficient for us to wag our fingers too arduous at Apple. On the finish of the day, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional continues to be a badass laptop computer.
Don’t neglect to take a look at our face-off between the M1 Professional MacBook Professional (2021) and the M2 Professional MacBook Professional (2023)
