Apple MacBook Pro M2 Review

Summarized

The 13.3″ MacBook Pro uses a chassis that’s been around since 2016. It’s a tried-and-true design, and it packs a well-calibrated, high-brightness display. The design is dated, which is why you’re missing out on a MagSafe connection, a 1080p camera and a slightly higher screen, which are found on other new MacBooks.The new M2 processor is not a revolution like the M1, but a nice evolution that delivers more speed.The battery life has remained the same and will remain A tricky point is the price, which has risen, while for that money you still only get 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD.The extra costs for extra memory or storage are exorbitant.

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You can’t see it from the outside. Not even if you look very closely. You have to switch on the laptop and only when you are logged in can you conclude that the laptop you have in front of you is actually the device with Apple’s very latest, self-developed processor, the M2. The M2 is, you guessed it, the successor to the M1 processor and, according to Apple, is above all more efficient and graphically stronger than its predecessor. The MacBook Pro 13.3″ is the first laptop that Apple has put that chip in. It is a laptop that does not differ in appearance from the 13.3″ MacBook Pro that Apple introduced eight years ago. Can that design last for a few more years and is the M2 worth upgrading? You can read it in this review.

When Apple introduced the MacBook Pro 13.3 “in 2016, it showed a laptop with a few striking features. The laptop first stood out because of its Touch Bar, the touchscreen that replaced the physical keys at the top of the keyboard. You can also access peripherals. only using USB-C connections and finally there was the keyboard with butterfly-tests. That keyboard caused problems for many users and forced Apple to excuses to offer. From 2020, the butterfly keys gave way to a regular keyboard with scissorswitches. Appearance is that ‘magical‘ keyboard is also the only difference from the earlier models.

According to Apple, this design can last for a while, but how timeless is it really? On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with the exterior of the MacBook Pro. It is an unadorned housing made of sturdy aluminum and, as we are used to from Apple, neatly finished. You notice this, for example, when you open the screen. This is done with little resistance, but still enough to keep it in place once opened. When closed, the screen ends up neatly muted on the C-cover and remains in place thanks to the magnets that are hidden in the housing. The housing also feels solid and is not easy to press in any place. The screen cannot be twisted.

Still, there are signs of age that the housing can no longer mask. Take the top screen edge for example. It is almost one and a half centimeters wide, a bit wider than the side edges, which have also fallen sharply by 2022 standards. Competitive 13.3″ laptops have millimeter-thick edges, making them more compact and increasingly lighter. The MacBook Pro 13.3″ weighs 1380 grams, not particularly light for a 13.3″ laptop, and then there’s a Touch Bar in. With the introduction of the MacBook 14″ and 16″, Apple basically ditched the touch bar, because if those top models didn’t have it, what’s the Touch Bar doing on this cheaper model? Developers will come to the same conclusion and will probably don’t take it into account in their software anymore.

As far as connections are concerned, as a user of the MacBook Pro you will have to make do with two USB-C ports, just like with the previous generation. Apple provides new MacBook models with a magnetic MagSafe connection, but this has not yet been taken into account with this model. If your laptop is on the charger, it ‘costs’ you a USB-C connection, while that is not the case with the MagSafe MacBooks. The two USB ports support USB 4, but have the same major drawback as the M1 MacBooks; you can only connect one external display to it. That may be a 6k screen at 60Hz, but due to a limitation of the chip, more than one screen is not possible, no matter how low the resolution. You can work around it with DisplayLink adapters, but they do have some drawbacks, including the absence of HDCPsupport and the need for compression to squeeze the image through a USB cable as quickly as possible.

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