all right so this is the new 13-inch m2 macbook pro and i don't think anyone should actually buy it wait what yeah no i think it's a great computer first of all don't get me wrong but with the introduction of the m2 macbook air and the existence of the 14-inch m1 pro macbook pro they've managed to squeeze any reason for this machine to exist at this price to basically zero nobody should buy it yeah but nobody that i mean that seems pretty harsh matter of fact i'm here let me challenge you on that this is a great computer changed my mind okay well let's just start with the design so apple's been going through their laptop lineup upgrading everything with this new square shape larger displays with thinner bezels getting rid of the touch bar and actually adding ports but this particular refresh didn't get any of that so this brand new laptop looks exactly the same as the m1 macbook pro from two years ago which looks exactly the same as the 13-inch intel macbook pro with the touch bar that dropped in 2016 because it is exactly the same i could give him sustainability credit i guess for recycling an old design and apparently using the same boxes from the m1 macbook pro just with new stickers on them but yeah this exact shell design is literally six years old and is starting to look kind of out of place now next to apple's other notebooks like can you imagine any other company trying to reuse a six-year-old design like you trying to tell me a 2016 asus laptop re-release would fly today like a six-year-old xps drop like that's wild yeah but this isn't that like let me tell you uh if it ain't broke don't fix it and i'm not just saying that like this is a really good laptop design all metal jacket a plus hinge and let me just remind you you reviewed it and you loved it the screen was bright and high resolution still is the speakers were best in class still are great track pad and keyboard and by the way some people do really like the touch bar you said so yourself it might not do a whole lot but it still has its few advantages okay but that that is in a vacuum like that's the thing by itself i would agree with you this computer is a perfectly good laptop buy it but as soon as you put it alongside the new macbook air which is basically the same price it's actually worse at basically everything like i got hands on time with the new m2 macbook air that's about to come out next month right the air has a larger display with thinner bezels and in that notch there's a new 1080p webcam instead of a 6 year old 720p webcam it has magsafe with a color matching cable which enables fast charging and essentially frees up an extra port since that's one more usb-c port that you're not plugged into and it's all in a package that's thinner weighs less and is basically the same price so why would you buy this macbook pro how is it even pro anymore you know what that's a good question why would you buy this pro the answer i think first of all is it is the cheapest pro in the lineup technically it's true but really the reason you get this over the air is the thicker chassis supports active cooling so it's got a fan and all the benefits that come with that i mean the benchmarks are in and to the surprise of absolutely no one it's pretty clear that this m2 chip is awesome it's living up to the 10 to 20 percent better multi-core cpu performance and even more impressively the two extra gpu cores over m1 is giving it 30 to 40 percent better gpu performance which is basically the only area where you could say m1 was lacking so this is awesome for any applications that lean on the gpu everything's faster final cut is faster premiere is faster any games you might play are all faster and the cherry on top is it has a dramatically improved media engine same one from the higher end chips actually so you can actually pull off some heavier final cut pro edits so for something like that while you're in a program for hours and things are getting hot okay that's when you need the fans to kick in keep performance high longer than the macbook air ever could no throttling so if you've got the sustained workloads and the long performance stuff you should get the m2 macbook pro no no those people should just go straight to the 14 inch m1 pro macbook pro just go straight to the big brother look if you know you're going to be doing workloads and things that the macbook air can't handle then you should just go to the actually pro laptop the upgraded machine if you're going to get a nice laptop and you want to do extra performance stuff on it you weren't going to get the baseline macbook pro right you were going to bump it up first of all because you want at least 16 gigs of memory right and second of all because the 256 gigs of baseline pro storage is kind of insulting and that version has particularly clipped ssd performance worse than even the m1 macbook pro so to get to one terabyte and 16 gigs you're already looking at like 1900 for this machine at that point just get the 14 inch pro because that laptop is on another level of performance i mean don't get me wrong it's absolutely awesome to see the jump from m1 to m2 and that's going to enable a ton more great stuff for the most popular laptop for the everyday baseline users but if you zoom out there's still a big difference in performance when moving up to the higher end chips m1 pro and then m1 max the amount of additional performance you get for the extra two to three hundred dollars is massive if that's what you really want that's what you should get plus you get a much better brighter mini led high refresh rate screen too and the webcam and the notch is way better much better speakers and actually get some ports while you're at it so i just i don't know you shouldn't get a literal worse version of all of those things i mean two to three hundred bucks isn't nothing i mean it's not zero but like i don't know really squeezes this new macbook pro quite a bit and plus you can't get around the fact that it's it's literally worse at all those things i think you're forgetting something uh oh really the macbook pro has studio quality microphones while the macbook air does not um i mean so technically they both are listed as having triple microphone arrays with beamforming it's just apple chose to call the one in the macbook pro studio quality it might have a slight difference but really are you gonna pay extra for that and then sacrifice all this other stuff okay i think there is one redeeming factor and what is that battery the macbook pro has surprisingly excellent battery life better than i think pretty much all of us expected we saw the 20 hours of video playback quoted on stage but in real world use this might be the best battery life in any modern laptop we've ever seen there's people out here getting 16 to 20 hours of actual real world use the verge's laptop reviewer monica wrote a hilarious piece about how long it took her to run down a battery and across the board it's a tremendously long performer so if you want the best battery in any laptop get this one okay so that is awesome to see but at the same time those other laptops already have great battery life too so you're not trying to spend just to get a slightly better battery and then sacrifice all those other things we talked about it's really quite a small difference uh so the ideal customer for this new macbook pro m2 is somebody who just needs a slightly better sustained performance than the new macbook air and is willing to sacrifice screen size webcam speakers ports thickness and weight to get it or someone who is literally about to buy the 13-inch m1 macbook pro enterprise yep enterprise that's it you.