Apple MacBook Pro M2 Chip 8GB RAM 256GB SSD 13.3″ Retina IPS Display

Design.

This MacBook Pro is an exceptionally svelte and portable machine. At 1.4kg light and 1.56cm in thickness, it’s just more than the 1.24kg/1.13cm 13-Inch M2 MacBook Air. Despite being so slim, Apple’s build quality is solid as usual, with no discernible flex or creaks in the device.

However, while the slimness may be great news for portability, it does result in pathetic physical connectivity: just two Thunderbolt/USB 4 Type-C ports. Given that one of these is required to connect the charger, this leaves you with just a single port for connecting peripherals. Realistically a separate dongle will therefore be required.

You will also realize something strange with the M2 MacBook Pro’s screen, perhaps due to the mixed feedback on the M2 Air’s notched display, the M2 Pro actually has a slightly smaller 13.3 inch panel (compared to 13.6 inch for the Air). This does away with a need for a notch, as the webcam is contained completely in the top bezel, but it also means those bezels are necessarily thicker and therefore more unsightly.

But in the Pro’s favour, you do get Apple’s Touch Bar. This thin touch-sensitive strip dynamically changes its touch buttons according to the open app, giving you buttons and sliders relevant to what you’re currently working on. A few years ago the Touch Bar was Apple’s next big thing, touted as being a worthwhile alternative to a conventional full-on touch screen. However these days Apple is gradually omitting it from its laptops, and now the 13-inch M2 Pro is the only current MacBook to include the Touch Bar. Whether that’s a benefit for you of course depends on whether you’ve learnt to incorporate it into your workflow, but I find it a genuinely useful feature when using the laptop on the go. The overall design of this MacBook is excellent and does not disappoint.

Performance.

With a supposed 40% performance increase over the original M1 MacBook Pro, we all had high hopes for the speed of the M2 ‘Pro. On the Benchmark performance, it compares favourably with HP Pavilion All-in-One 27″ Core i7 – 8GB/1TB (Touch), which is something good to note.

The M2 chip is an upgraded version of the M1 chip, which was Apple’s first attempt at designing its own ARM-based silicon. The M2 is the latest and most efficient Apple Silicon, with an 18% faster CPU, a 35% faster GPU and a 40% faster neural engine than previous generations, as well as 50% more memory bandwidth.

Screen quality has always been a particularly strong aspect of MacBooks, and the M2 Pro is no exception. Color accuracy, backlight consistency and color space coverage are all excellent, and the 2560 x 1600 resolution is exceptionally high for a screen of this size, easily hiding the outline of individual pixels at normal viewing distances.

Another laptop performance metric that often receives little attention is audio quality. The M2 Pro’s sound processing produces a particularly expansive effect that results in a soundstage far larger than you’d expect from such a compact laptop. The Audio surprised us like what the Xiaomi Redmi 11 Pro 5G did. You can also use the Apple Airpods Pro if you do not prefer the loud Audio.

Battery and Productivity.

The laptop also sports a very good display, good speakers and long battery life of up to ten hours in our WiFi web surfing test. Furthermore, the cooling system of the MacBook Pro M2 remains silent during regular usage. In conclusion, we found that this machine is still a very good subnotebook with a great user experience