Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro is a superfast (and familiar) powerhouse

It might have been a low-key kind of revolution compared to the iPhone’s 2007 launch (or those much-rumoured augmented reality glasses), but Apple’s Macs have been enjoying a bona fide moment of late. Since almost every one of the Cupertino-based company’s computers uttered “thank u, next” to Intel-powered processors in favour of homemade silicon, they’ve uniformly become faster than the Windows competition while offering far superior battery life. The effect is sort of akin to when Leo Messi learned how to play football with his right foot as well or when Drake realized he could rap without riffing off Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak: a total gamechanger. Now Apple’s new MacBook Pro is heralding ‘round two’ of its great M series takeover.

First announced at this year’s WWDC conference alongside that tasty, redesigned MacBook Air, the latest Pro is an altogether more restrained affair. If you’ve picked up one of these laptops in the last few years, you won’t immediately spot the difference between this latest model and what came before. In truth, the only substantial upgrade here is an all-new M2 chip that promises a generational performance boost over its predecessor. Having used this new Pro throughout the past week, that punch-up is by no means to be sniffed at.

The Bourne Necessity

OK. Before we get to the good stuff, it’s probably worth noting that this MacBook Pro is a real product of financial necessity, like a 6am flight to somewhere sunny or any Rolling Stones album post-1981. It exists because the 13-inch MacBook Pro is Apple’s second best-selling laptop after the Air, and those all-new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros that got launched last year – the ones with an industrial redesign, glorious Liquid Retina XDR display and MagSafe charging – are expensive. We’re talking ‘prices start at £1,899 expensive’, in this cost of living crisis.

At £1,349, this eminently more affordable Pro now ranks as the go-to model for creative students, would-be YouTubers and bedroom beatniks. In the midst of a semiconductor shortage (AKA the thing that’s still holding you back from getting a new PS5), refreshing an old product design with a new chip and little else also affords Apple a far easier manufacturing process. So although both this computer and the MacBook Air were unveiled on the same day, it’s the Pro that arrives first while the Air is coming sometime in July.

Just how samey is the 13-inch MacBook Pro? Well, it has the same Retina display screen, the same 720p FaceTime webcam and even the same Touch Bar instead of a traditional row of function keys like every other of Apple’s recent computers has reverted back to. As innovations go, the Touch Bar’s contextual controls for volume, spelling suggestions and the like are useful some of the time and a minor annoyance on other occasions. It ranks somewhere alongside Sega’s Dreamcast, Google Glass and the actual glass on a Tesla Cybertruck as good ideas that didn’t quite work out at the time. As with many of the other holdovers here, it’s by no means a dealbreaker.

Enter the M2

As much as this all doesn’t sound especially inspiring, in practice, this 13-inch MacBook Pro remains a killer laptop. It’s familiar but pretty much classic at this point, kind of like the all-white dress code at Wimbledon. If you can get over the chunky black bezels around its screen, you’re treated to some crisp, punchy and accurate visuals whether you’re video-editing, chomping through your inbox or kicking back with Ms. Marvel. A delightful Magic Keyboard and trackpad combo gives you the tactile responsiveness you need while cranking out work to a deadline, and at 1.4kg and 1.56cm slim, this machine is svelte enough to chuck in a backpack without having to dig out all your belongings beforehand. Basically, what this Pro lacks in je ne sais quoi it makes up for in being able to get the job done, whatever you throw at it.

Speaking of which, the new M2 chip that powers everything takes no prisoners whatsoever. Apple claims it delivers “nearly 40 per cent faster video-editing performance” than its M1 predecessor, but how apparent those gains turn out to be will depend on what you do with this laptop – it’s gonna take a lot more than 20 open Chrome tabs to make this thing pause for breath. Having run some proper benchmarking tests with it, we can definitively say that the 13-inch MacBook Pro was already one of the fastest laptops out there and now it’s even further ahead of the competition. When a laptop is capable of playing up to 11 simultaneous streams of 4K ProRes 422 video at 30 frames per second, you know that it won’t suffer fools gladly.

Having used the Pro for a week now, we’d actually say its battery life is actually the most immediately impressive thing about it. We used this laptop on and off on a five-hour train journey from London to deepest, darkest Wales, and then followed that with a full working day of Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs, and still ended a healthy chunk of stamina left in the tank. That is ridiculously good going for any laptop and gives decent credence to Apple’s claim of up to 20 hours of battery life given the right conditions.

What about the Air?

Given this M2-powered MacBook Pro was announced alongside an all-new MacBook Air earlier this month – one that costs just £100 less and comes with a bigger display, better webcam, the same M2 chip and MagSafe charging – you’d be crazy to not at least consider opting for the alternative. Should you actually plump for the shiny new thing instead? Having spent the best part of ten minutes with the Air whilst mired in a media scrum, we’re not exactly in a position to give you a definitive verdict beyond the fact that it looks cool

What we can say is that the Pro has two major upsides over its head-turning younger brother. It has a quoted two hours of extra battery life, which makes a difference if you’re in the business of getting a lot of work done on your travels, and it has fan cooling. That latter feature means it can push the M2 chip harder when it’s working on big video editing and design-centric projects. In many ways, this entry-level MacBook Pro is a victim of just how good Apple’s M series chips have turned out to be. When even your most basic laptop is an absolute powerhouse the next option up is naturally going to have its thunder stolen.