The MacBook Pro will get the M2 treatment as soon as this fall - Ars Technica

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  The 16-inch MacBook Pro with its lid closed.

  Samuel Axon

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  With the lid open: a notched display, a large trackpad, and the current keyboard design with Touch ID.

  Samuel Axon

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  MagSafe returned to the MacBook Pro in 2021.

  Samuel Axon

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  HDMI and SD card slots made a comeback in 2021, too.

  Samuel Axon

Second-generation refreshes of the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple's M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist—who has accurately reported on upcoming Apple products before—wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro is "likely to stay roughly the same," with no major new visual changes or features beyond what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that, unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more oriented toward heavy-duty workflows than the M2 that shipped over the past couple of months in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

"Look for much of the focus to be on the graphics side," Gurman writes. That makes sense; the M2 offered a modest boost in CPU performance over its predecessor (10 to 20 percent, depending on the task), but it offers substantially better graphics performance—up to 40 percent faster.

A fall launch would suggest that the MacBook Pro will be adopting an iPhone-like annual update cadence. But it also seems a little more aggressive than we would have expected. The M1 Pro and M1 Max rolled out a full year after the first M1 machines, so if Apple were to keep the same pace in its second generation of chips, we expect the MacBook Pro refreshes in spring 2023, not fall 2022.

Gurman acknowledges that's a possibility, too. "Given the continued supply chain challenges," he writes, "it's hard to predict exactly when these will hit store shelves." Still, it is plausible that the laptops will arrive this fall, despite Apple's M1 rollout pacing. That's in part because it might be faster for Apple to develop second-generation chips than the first go.

Listing image by Samuel Axon

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