With the impending release of the Apple M2 chip, potential MacBook buyers are wondering if it’s more powerful than the M1 Pro or M1 Max. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t the best at quantifying the performance of their hardware, so it can be tough to determine the winner of the M2 vs. M1 Pro and M1 Max showdown. We’ll take a look at how each of them stacks up below.
Is the Apple M2 more powerful than M1 Pro and Max?
Generally, the M1 Pro and M1 Max outperform the M2, which in turn surpasses the M1. The M2 may have better single-core performance than the M1 Pro and M1 Max, but the Pro and Max should beat it when it comes to multi-core and GPU performance as well as memory bandwidth.
There’s no way to quantify how far ahead of the M2 that the M1 Pro and M1 Max are. Apple stated the M1 Pro’s 16-core GPU is roughly twice as fast as the M1, and the M1 Max is twice as fast as the M1 Pro. Apple also claims that the M2 is 1.4x as fast as the M1. So, in these very loose terms, the M1 Pro should be 60% faster than the M2, and the M1 Max should have 120% better performance. However, these don’t translate well to real-world tasks and don’t necessarily tell the whole story.
Unfortunately, until the M2 MacBooks are available for benchmarking, all we have is Apple’s vague statements. Once the new models drop next month, we should better grasp where each laptop stands. We probably won’t see the M2 Pro and M2 Max until sometime next year, so the current models of those chips will continue to be Apple’s most powerful mobile offers until then.
