Why Apple's Newest Chip Isn't the Best

But that shouldn’t stop you from buying one.

- By Jason Cross

Apple's M2 is here...or it will be shortly, when the 13-inch MacBook begins shipping on June 24. As expected, the M2 is a nice upgrade over the M1 (fave.co/30YkQgb), but not revolutionary. There are improvements in every part of the system-on-chip; the CPU, GPU, memory system, Neural Engine, and media engine.

Clearly, the M2 is superior to the M1 (fave.co/30YkQgb), but it now begs the question: Is it worth buying a Mac with the M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra anymore? Just because the second generation of Apple silicon is here, does that mean the first generation has reached the end of the line? We don't have benchmarks yet, but in general, the answer to that is going to be yes, with the differences becoming starker as you move up the performance stack. If anything, it's those considering the M1 Pro simply to get more memory or GPU performance that might be tempted by the M2. Here's how the products stack up.

M2 VS M1 PRO

The M1 Pro has a CPU with up to eight performance cores (twice that in the M2) and two efficiency cores (half that of the M2). It's 10 cores for the M1 Pro versus 8 for the M2, but with the M1 Pro leaning more heavily toward performance cores.

The M1 Pro generally offered CPU performance about 60 percent higher than the M1's. Apple says the M2's CPU is 18 percent faster than the M1's (and recently leaked benchmarks [fave.co/3yF3AHi] back up those numbers), so there's still a pretty substantial gap there. When the benchmarks arrive, we suspect the M1 Pro will still deliver multi-core performance that is around 35 percent higher than the M2's.

The M2's GPU is 35 percent faster than that of the M1, according to Apple. But the M1 Pro, with up to 16 GPU cores and way more memory bandwidth, is about twice as fast as the M1. So expect the M1 Pro to still come in around 40 percent faster than the M2.