Should You Upgrade To The 2023 MacBook Pro M2? – SlashGear

This shouldn’t need saying, but Apple fans are a curious group, so here we go: if you bought a MacBook that contains the company’s M2 chip six months ago, you don’t need to upgrade it. Just as you don’t need to upgrade your iPhone every year, especially when Apple is making minimal changes to the design and specification. The M2 chip was a great leap forward, and the performance bonuses it provides are well worth considering in a lot of cases. The M2 Max and M2 Pro chips build on that and are probably better compared to the M1 Max and M1 Pro chips than the basic M2.

The M2 Pro has double the amount of memory bandwidth the basic M2 has. The M2 Max doubles that again. There are also 12-core versions of the Pro, and the Max comes with 12 cores as standard — that’s two more than the 10 you get with the standard M2. Both the Pro and Max also have a significant boost in the GPU department. The MacBook with the basic M2 is a different tier of the laptop, and if you purchased one last year, then you probably didn’t have the extreme applications of the M2 Pro and M2 Max in mind. 

After a while, you get some severe diminishing returns — even with the improvements in battery life and connectivity taken into account. In this case, you’d be trading a top-tier laptop and a couple of thousand dollars for a slightly better top-tier laptop. Yes, you can process images and video slightly faster, but you can also go grab a cup of coffee while they’re processing slightly slower, too.