That’s a $3,900 premium over the $1,999 entry price. Bump it up to 8TB of storage and you get all the way up to $5,899 (if you go for the 16-inch, meanwhile, you can move the needle over $6,000). Memory options range from 16 to 64GB (the latter of which can only be had with the Max) and 512GB all the way up to 8TB. The company sent along the M1 Max with a 10-core PU and 32-core GPU, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. These things add up fast, of course, but welcome to the shopping cart.
Ultimately, I think the company did the right thing here, offering the Max as an upgrade for both systems, at $200.
It’s the creator class, the people who regularly push their systems to the limit with 3D rendering, 8K video editing and other activities that might have seemed a near impossibility on a laptop a decade back. But the core demo that Apple is going after here isn’t most users. Heck, for most users in most scenarios, the regular old M1 will get the job done. Both are effectively souped-up versions of the M1 (built on the same 5nm architecture), and for most users in most scenarios, the differences between the two variants will be negligible. We expected a new chip in the lead up to this month’s Unleashed event, but Apple managed to surprise us by dropping two, the M1 Pro and M1 Max. The heart of the product is, of course, Apple’s latest silicon. It was clear then that the distinction wasn’t as pronounced as we’ve come to expect between the two models, and the arrival of this year’s Pro models have only served to highlight the gulf. The truth of it is that the 13-inch MacBook has more common DNA with the Air it was introduced alongside - a MacBook Pro Lite or MacBook Air+, perhaps. The device is sticking around in the lineup for the time being, as a 13-inch sibling to the newly announced 14- and 16-inch models. With a year of hindsight, it seems entirely plausible that last year’s 13-inch MacBook Pro will go down as a kind of curiosity, like the 2016 MacBook before it. They’re powerful, hulking machines that look to the future of the Mac, while bringing back some hits from the past. And in many ways, the new Pro models represent the purest manifestation of that. Your mileage may vary.Īpple has made a concerted effort to recapture the creative pros who, for years, have been fundamental to its computer lineup. One never wants to lose any ports, but many will no doubt view the return of HDMI and MagSafe as a fair tradeoff.
It’s joined by an SD card slot (support for SD 4.0 standard, UHS-I and UHS-II SDXC cards), HDMI port and a row of function keys (replacing the beleaguered Touch Bar), which are all but gone from the current Mac lineup (with last year’s 13-inch MacBook Pro serving as the final holdout).There are three USB-C ports on-board - down from four on 13-inch. The connector is, happily, back - in improved form. The move from USB-A to USB-C was clearly a sign of inevitable progress. Sometimes, as in the case of the headphone jack and the disk drive before it, mainstream consumer use catches up, and for many, the features are hardly missed. We as the consumers both demand change while complaining about it. It doesn’t always wind up the way you’d expect. That’s one of many instances where Apple was clearly ahead of the curve. “Courage,” as the company infamously phrased it, when it dropped the headphone jack, back in 2016. As the MacBook has evolved, features have come and gone. But, in addition to the new features, it finds the company returning some old favorites that many in the community no doubt feared were long gone. The new model isn’t a kitchen-sink laptop - Apple doesn’t really do kitchen-sink devices. It’s a crowd-pleaser for longtime devotees who have stuck with the line through port feast and port famine. But the proprietary connector is an important microcosm. That distinction almost certainly belongs to the new M1 Pro and Max chips. MagSafe is hardly the most important arrival on the 2021 MacBook Pro.
This is, I fully recognize, a strange place to begin a lengthy review of a new Pro-focused laptop. The version that Apple unceremoniously abandoned in 2017, with the arrival of the all-USB-C/Thunderbolt MacBook. Not the iPhone version (not to say that isn’t without its own charm) - the original. I don’t recall the last time I saw so many colleagues legitimately excited for one specific new feature. The reaction among TechCrunch staff was swift and, best I can tell, universal.