How the M2 will shape the next Macs and complete the Apple silicon transition

Apple's next-generation chip is here but it might take a while before it shows up in another Mac.

-  DAN MOREN

After months-if not years-of fevered theorizing over Apple's chip roadmap for the Mac, this year's Worldwide Developers Conference at last gave us a tantalizing peek at the successor to the blockbuster M1 (fave.co/3ywYjII), released a little over a year and a half ago.

We learned a bit more about the M2 this week when the first round of reviews landed (see page 46). The 13-inch MacBook Pro is identical to the M1 model on the outside, but the inside is completely different, thanks to Apple's latest chip. Benchmarks show a nice speed boost of around 20 percent, a significant jump in graphics performance, and a very good improvement over the already speedy M1 (fave.co/3y5CGaj).

But, far more excitingly, now that we've got a second data point to work with, we can start to extrapolate a little more about the future of the M2 and when we might expect to see it make its way into the rest of the Mac lineup. (Like any professional writer, I can turn two dots into a line. Don't try this at home, kids.) BEYOND M2 It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that the M2 is destined for most of Apple's consumer-level lineup, just as the M1 made its way into the 24-inch iMac (fave. co/3AvIV7y) and the Mac mini (fave.co/33h00Wq). The real question is whether, as was the case with the M1, Apple chooses to use the same version of the chip in all of those machines.

In the case of the M1, Apple offered a binned 7-core GPU variant in the entry-level iMacs and MacBook Air; this time around, that low-end variant is an 8-core GPU M2, which could be a binned version of the 10-core GPU. (It is worth noting, however, that the low-end M2 MacBook Air starts at $200 more than the entry-level M1 Air did.)