Before you buy a new M2 Pro or M2 Max Mac, here are five key things to know

We know they will be faster, but what else did Apple deliver with its new chips?

- JASON CROSS

The march of Apple silicon is not slowing down. To power the new high-end Mac mini (fave.co/ 3jwRj31) and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro (fave.co/3DDarDw) systems, Apple has unveiled the all-new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors (fave.co/ 3NzwOM6), taking all the improvements of the A15 and A16 processors and applying them to the Mac chips, resulting in a significant boost in performance over the M1 line. Apple claims the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips bring 20 percent better CPU performance and 30 percent faster GPU performance than the M1 Pro and M1 Max. They also include the newer Neural Engine, which is up to 40 percent faster than that in the M1 series.

As impressive as those claims are, they are also unsurprising and a bit disappointing. Some of the more exciting rumors about more advanced manufacturing, new GPUs, or other improvements have proven untrue, and the M2 Pro and M2 Max appear to be exactly what was expected: The M2 scaled up with more CPU and GPU cores and a wider memory bus. In fact, the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips had more to differentiate them from the M1 than the M2 Pro and M2 Max do (fave.co/ 3JH1LzB) when compared to the M2.

But still, there are some interesting things to know about these chips before you decide to buy one of the new Macs. Here are five key characteristics worth noting.

SAME CPU CORE DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE AS M2