The 5 MacBooks Heating Up The Industry: The 2022 CRN Mobile 100
Apple’s core line-up of laptops get a boost from new silicon while the company makes strides despite a troubled supply chain.
Apple has a healthy share of fanboys and fangirls for a good reason. The industry giant somehow straddles the line between bold visionary and unflinching stubbornness with unmatched results. It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s been working just fine for the company.
Apple has just a handful of core product lines and either makes changes at a snail’s pace, or will make a reboot happen out of thin air. The MacBook has been a constant in Apple’s portfolio since the line’s birth in 1991. And let’s not pretend there aren’t plenty of naysayers out there – analysts have been warning of the demise of Mac since, well, since its inception. But the Cupertino, Calif.-based giant always seems to have a new trick up its sleeve. And its playbook always seems to include some MacBook news.
At the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2022 earlier this month, Apple announced two new MacBooks with its latest silicon offering: the M2 Arm-based chip. The company had warned that it would take an $8 billion revenue hit from ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns in China, so it was a welcome surprise when they announced that the new MacBooks would hit preorder status earlier than expected.
As part of CRN’s 2022 Mobile 100, here are the five latest MacBook devices that are making waves right now.
5 Macbooks that are heating up the industry
MacBook Pro 13-inch M1
Apple Inc.’s MacBook Pro 13 serves as the company’s entry into its vaunted Pro range of laptops. But armed with the company’s Arm-based M1 chip, it stands right up to its more powerful siblings in the range. The MacBook Pro 13 is powered by the M1, a powerhouse Arm chip with 8-cores, an 8-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, up to 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of SSD storage. Other than the extremely impressive specs, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company also wowed with the introduction of an up-to 20-hour battery (rated for 17 hours of wireless web and 20 hours of Apple TV app movie playback). All this fun starts at $1,299.
MacBook Pro 14-inch M1 Pro
Bigger, better, faster, stronger. Those words will loop in your brain as you move up the MacBook Pro food chain. Apple’s middle child offering in the Pro range refuses to be ignored with even better battery life, a beautiful mini-LED display, blazing speeds of the M1 Pro chip, and just all-around excellence. The Pro 14-inch carries the M1 Pro chip (upgradable to the M1 Max) with 10-cores of CPU power, up to 16-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine and 200GB/s memory bandwidth, up to 32 GB memory (64GB with M1 Max), and up to 8TB of SSD storage. This computer could be configured to meet the most demanding jobs on the planet. But that power will take a bite out of your budget. The Pro 14-inch starts at $1,999.
MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Max
In every game, there’s the nearly unbeatable boss. It would take an awful lot to best Apple’s flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Max. We’re going to go ahead and spec this one out to the max to get a full idea of the possibilities. The Pro 16-inch powered by M1 Max gives you a whopping 10-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, a 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine and 400GB/s memory bandwidth, 64GB of RAM, 8TB of storage, and barely a second to catch your breath. Once you do, sit back and enjoy the 16.2-inch mini-LED backlit display at 3,456x2,234 at 1,600 nits peak with refresh rates up to 120Hz. You’ll be paying a steep price for all that firepower. Fully specced-out, the MacBook Pro 16-inch will set you back $6,099. (The entry level Pro 16-inch starts at $2,499).
MacBook Air, M2 (2020)
There were concerns when Apple Inc. announced that its new MacBook Air in 2020 with the yet-unproven M1 chip. Could a fan-less, thin laptop handle all that power? Two years later as the company releases its M2 version, we have plenty of answers. Not only could the Air handle the blazing speeds of that Arm-based chip, but its clever engineering did also reduce performance just enough to handle heat -- and most users could barely notice the difference. The MacBook Air with M2 sports up to 24GB RAM, up to 2TB SSD storage, and will keep you engaged with its 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display at 2,560x1,664 resolution with 500 nits of brightness. An up to 10-core processor will have you blazing through high productivity workloads and the battery will handle 15-18 hours of use on a charge. That’s a lot of computer in a small 11.97 x 8.46 x 0.44 inch chassis. Priced at $1,199 to start, it’s $200 more than its predecessor.
MacBook Pro With M2 Chip
Apple didn’t hold back at this year’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), where it announced the follow-up to its wildly popular introduction into the silicon landscape – the Arm-based M1. With the announcement that a new 13-inch MacBook Pro would be outfitted with the new M2 chip, users demanding more power and better energy consumption let out a collective sigh of relief. Apple had warned that COVID lockdowns in China would hamper its computer production in 2022, so a new MacBook was welcome news. Even better: Instead of the estimated July preorder, Apple shocked again by releasing the first units for preorder on June 17. The M2 powered MacBook Pro features up to 512 GB of SSD Storage, 8-Core CPU, 10-Core GPU, 8GB of Unified Memory, 16-core Neural Engine, 13-inch Retina display with True Tone. Pricing on the new MacBook Pro starts at $1,299.