Apple did not launch a new Mac product in the fourth quarter of 2022, which is the first time in the past 20 years Apple had such a situation. Apple may launch a new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro in the first half of this year and the relevant summary as follows.
Release Date.
Ming-Chi Kuo has said that Apple plans to mass-produce the new 14/16-inch MacBook Pro in the fourth quarter of 2022; then Gurman revealed that the new MacBook Pro will be released at the earliest by the end of 2022, which can now be determined in the first half of this year.
Gurman recently revised his release expectations. He believes that Apple is unlikely to choose to release the MacBook Pro in January/February, most likely in the spring special event held in March this year.
design
The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros won’t change cosmetically this year. In June 2022, Mark Gurman said that the new MacBook Pro “wouldn’t be fundamentally new, other than offering a faster chip.” That means Apple will stick with the same form factor.
This form factor is more square with a camera bangs area at the top of the screen and offers more connectivity ports. Apple may choose to return to ports like the SDXC card slot and HDMI. Apple has also reintroduced the popular MagSafe charging port.
Processor.
Gurman has previously said that Apple is working on five M2 processor-powered Macs, including the M2 Pro and M2 Max 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. This confirms that Apple may stick with the same processor configuration as earlier models, powering the new Macbook Pro with the M2 chip in the Pro and Max versions.
This reserves the base M2 for the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2022) and MacBook Air (2022) and the M1 Ultra for Mac Studio.
The M2 Max chip can deliver up to 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores, up from the M1 Max’s 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores, Gurman said. Existing M2s typically offer about a 20 percent performance boost over the M1, so this could be a pretty impressive performance leap.
Still up for debate is whether these will use a 5nm or 3nm process. The latter would be another improvement in power and efficiency, but it may not be ready in time. Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in 2022 that the next MacBook Pro will likely still have a 5-nanometer chip, leaving the 3-nanometer process for a successor model. In a report in late August 2022, Ming-Chi Kuo reiterated those statements, saying that Apple’s next batch of MacBook Pro models will not feature 3 nanometer technology.
Continuity.
There is no battery power improvement between the Apple M1 and Apple M2. This suggests that the 2022 versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro will continue to deliver 11 and 14 hours of battery life on a full charge, respectively.
These numbers aren’t terrible, especially for the 14-inch MacBook Pro model, but they’re much better than Apple promised on its Intel-based laptops.
Screens.
There are no reports that Apple will upgrade the MacBook Pro’s screen, which means the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro will still feature a Liquid Retina XDR screen.
The 14-inch model has a 14.2-inch Mini LED backlit display with a screen resolution of 3024 x 1964 pixels. Additionally, it has a brightness of 1000 nits for XDR, 1600 nits for HDR content, and a maximum of 500 nits for SDR. In comparison, the larger MacBook Pro offers a 16.2-inch Mini-LED backlit display with a screen resolution of 3456×2234 pixels and similar brightness levels.
Storage and memory:
Storage options should remain the same, but Apple’s new M2 Pro and M2 Max will likely support higher unified memory. Apple hinted at this when it launched the first M2 MacBook in 2022. For example, the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2022) has 24GB of unified memory, compared to 16GB on earlier models. By comparison, while the 2020 MacBook Air offers 16GB of unified memory, the 2022 model maxes out at 24GB.
The current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models offer 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of unified memory, depending on whether you choose the M1 Pro or M1 Max chip. I would suggest that the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro (2023) models (with the M2 Pro or M2 Max chips) might start with 32GB of unified RAM, going up to 128GB like the Mac Studio (2022) with the M1 Max or M1 Ultra .
selling price
Apple may add the M2 Pro and Max chips to the MacBook Pro (2023) lineup as an additional, more powerful configuration option to the current lineup.
Apple is replacing the M1 Pro/Max version with the M2 Pro/Max version, and pricing for the 14-inch and 16-inch models may remain the same, starting at $1,999 and $2,499, respectively.
