Apple is reportedly testing nine M2-powered Macs

[midian182]

Something to look forward to: With Apple having released the last chip in its current M1 lineup earlier this year—the M1 Ultra—the company is working on its next in-house SoC: the M2. According to a recent report, Cupertino is preparing nine new Macs that will feature the processor and its variants.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes that Apple has begun widespread internal testing of several new Macs with the upcoming M2 chips, which are said to be produced on TSMC's 4nm process node. The nine models, fitted with four different M2-based SoCs, include a new MacBook Air that will feature eight CPU cores and ten graphics cores.

There will also be an entry-level MacBook Pro with the same specs as the Air, along with 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with 64GB of memory and M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, the latter of which will feature 12 CPU cores and 38 graphics cores, up from 10 and 32 found in the current M1 Max.

Finally, there's a Mac Pro that will pack the successor to the mighty M1 Ultra chip found in the Mac Studio.

Gurman says Apple is testing a Mac mini, too—possibly the one we heard about earlier this week—with the same M1 Pro chip found in the latest entry-level 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. It also tested an M1 Max version of the Mac mini, but neither may make it into the hands of consumers, given the Mac Studio's existence.

The report comes after a previous piece from Gurman in February that claimed no fewer than four M2-powered Macs were set to launch this year

There was no word of the reported 15-inch Apple device that's somewhere between an Air and Pro yet carries neither name. We might find out more about Apple's plans during the all-digital WWDC between June 6 – 10.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/94219-apple-reportedly-testing-nine-m2-powered-macs.html

 

[Dimitriid]

Well that's interesting but I'm sure a very incremental upgrade: From 20 to 24 hours of battery life! Now instead of 8 simultaneous 8k streams playing it's 10 x 8k streams playing! Look at this graph without any axis legends whatsoever, see how the line goes up EVEN FURTHER now!? Huh!? Pay us another 2000 bucks for it!

On second thought I think I should revise my initial reaction: it's probably not going to be that interesting: I was wrong in my estimation and Apple will absolutely not disrupt the PC market at all whatsoever: they make a decent profit on the guys who own phones and are deeply into their ecosystem but they aren't interested in mass appeal and with their devices being both incredibly closed, on an unfamiliar architecture for desktop development (ARM) and with almost nothing in the way of trying to address the gigantic blind spots like gaming and lack of adoption on the enterprise world.

I think they're ok with just being a minor competitor by volume and a medium sized competitor by margin but relatively microscopic compared to their market dominance on the mobile world.

 

[VitalyT]

Waiting to replace cheese grater with a potato gun.

 

[Sausagemeat]

Turning the screw. These ARM parts from Apple are genuinely revolutionary. My iPad Pro M1 scores significantly higher in browser based benchmark results than my housemates Ryzen 7 5800X gaming PC. And it does this on a battery.

 

[HardReset]

Turning the screw. These ARM parts from Apple are genuinely revolutionary. My iPad Pro M1 scores significantly higher in browser based benchmark results than my housemates Ryzen 7 5800X gaming PC. And it does this on a battery.

And you used same browsers too? I doubt it.

There is nothing revoluationary on Apple's M1 chips. Except silicon wasting is taken into next level, that I agree.

 

[kiwigraeme]

Turning the screw. These ARM parts from Apple are genuinely revolutionary. My iPad Pro M1 scores significantly higher in browser based benchmark results than my housemates Ryzen 7 5800X gaming PC. And it does this on a battery.

Wow - what does this mean in real life when you browse Techspot?
I have 3 PCs at home my Intel core 2 one - does browsing just fine .

Horses for courses - Know nothing about Apple - but probably post video work for your iphone is done very fast etc .
A simple Chromebook is all you need for browsing if that's it's man purpose

 

[Sausagemeat]

Wow - what does this mean in real life when you browse Techspot?
I have 3 PCs at home my Intel core 2 one - does browsing just fine .

Horses for courses - Know nothing about Apple - but probably post video work for your iphone is done very fast etc .
A simple Chromebook is all you need for browsing if that's it's man purpose

It’s just the browserbench speed run, it tests how quickly it can run script, load forms etc. give it a try you can see it working in real time. But it is just a benchmark, it’s useful for comparison only. I live in a shared house of RTX gaming PCs (mine isn’t RTX unfortunately) and the highest scoring system in this building is my housemates Mac mini (M1) that he uses exclusively as a media PC under his TV. Second place was my iPad M1. Then my housemates 5900X and 3080 then my other housemates 5800X And RTX 2080.

Alghough it’s also worth noting that this Mac mini dropped frames when running 8k YouTube but the RTX machines did not. Despite scoring a lot lower in browser bench.

Nobody is saying you need a fast computer to browse the web. I’m just pointing out the technical achievement made by Apple here. Their CPU uses an order of magnitude less power than a desktop Ryzen 5000 and yet outperforms it in intensive browser tasks. And that’s on the now about to be replaced M1.

BrowserBench.org — Browser Benchmarks

 

[CrisisDog]

I have access to a Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra chip. Playing any of the Tomb Raiders, at 4k, it stutters badly. Have a better experience at 2k resolution, getting about 45 FPS. So, yeah, not very ground breaking for the GPU, but were Macs ever good at gaming? On the other hand, I've also thrown some 10-bit 4k H265 video encoding through Handbrake at it. Two hours of video can reprocess at 45 ~ 75 minutes using hardware acceleration through VideoToolbox. At the moment, Nvidia's CUDA / NVENC encoder doesn't support 10-bit in HandBrake, still beta in snapshot builds. I have processed 8-bit through an RTX Titan in about the same time period, so yeah, the little Mac box does have some advantages for designers, but at a hefty price tag.

 

[rmcrys]

Turning the screw. These ARM parts from Apple are genuinely revolutionary. My iPad Pro M1 scores significantly higher in browser based benchmark results than my housemates Ryzen 7 5800X gaming PC. And it does this on a battery.

Battery life and benchmark scores are just a piece of the puzzle. If Apple doesn't solve the issue of no dual boot with windows or invest heavily on bringing known 3D/CAD apps and games/ compatibility to macos, those SoCs can be as powerful as an RTX 4090Ti and give you two weeks of battery life, that no one will care much.

You have an iPad with M1 so you do... nothing more than before; I have a Mac Mini M1 and I'm really happy with it: it was cheap and I can edit photos and video extremely well. But every time I want to play something from steam, it won't run or it won't run well. Rarely it does well.

So, now that Apple has a fabulous hardware, they need the software. Macos is really underwhelming... (gaming, file management, window management... - I had to buy the great app called magnet to do something that windows makes over a decade ago...-)

 

[Sausagemeat]

Battery life and benchmark scores are just a piece of the puzzle. If Apple doesn't solve the issue of no dual boot with windows or invest heavily on bringing known 3D/CAD apps and games/ compatibility to macos, those SoCs can be as powerful as an RTX 4090Ti and give you two weeks of battery life, that no one will care much.

You have an iPad with M1 so you do... nothing more than before; I have a Mac Mini M1 and I'm really happy with it: it was cheap and I can edit photos and video extremely well. But every time I want to play something from steam, it won't run or it won't run well. Rarely it does well.

So, now that Apple has a fabulous hardware, they need the software. Macos is really underwhelming... (gaming, file management, window management... - I had to buy the great app called magnet to do something that windows makes over a decade ago...-)

Apple will never allow dual boot to Windows on their devices and they don’t need to either. They aren’t trying to win those customers. They’re strategy on who they target is very clear and it’s not office workers or gamers.

By the sounds of your comment you are better off sticking to windows, you bought a Mac mini and you’re running games from steam on it? No one I know who owns Mac OS devices has steam installed. For similar money you could have had a far better windows gaming machine.

You’re right about my iPad though, I do just watch Netflix and edit short scuba diving video clips on it. But you can’t get an iPad Pro with a different SOC so it’s not like I bought one just because it had an M1 inside it. The fact that I get all that performance in my thin and light tablet is a nice bonus though.

Apple doesn’t need to make its hardware relevant to everyone for its engineering achievements to be impressive. I think the software is vastly superior to Windows in general but it’s definitely not as flexible.

 

[rmcrys]

Apple will never allow dual boot to Windows on their devices and they don’t need to either. They aren’t trying to win those customers. [...] By the sounds of your comment you are better off sticking to windows, you bought a Mac mini and you’re running games from steam on it? No one I know who owns Mac OS devices has steam installed.

My comment sounds nothing as I would have bought it for Steam. I bought it for productivity + media editing, while I have a silent device.

Nevertheless, your point is short on two issues:

1) if I buy a computer and I spend a good amount of money on it, I expect to do *everything* on it, as play games also. Even if you don't know anyone with steam on a Mac (because traditionally Apple has very bad API/Game support as bad GPUs, except on very expensive models), it doesn't or shouldn't mean "if you play games you can't buy a Mac, if you are a Mac fan, you can't play"

2) "Apple will never allow dual boot to Windows on their devices and they don’t need to either. They aren’t trying to win those customers": Apple tries to make money as much as possible but until now they couldn't do anything about GPU power. If it wasn't the case, iOS- devices wouldn't have the highest GPU performance and best mobile games of all. But on Mac they still didn't follow the route, perhaps because they are still focused on the new hardware and software change. It will come next, how soon... no-one knows.
About dual booting it is a Microsoft thing, not Apple's, so you're mistaken. All people or corporates that I know with x86 based Macs have Windows as dual boot or main OS. Only a few exceptions and those two usually only use their MacBooks for light web, office and email work. Many of those changed for a Dell as windows was far more important than "Apple-stuff". And with Intel 12th and soon 13th generation chips, Apple must fight well on the hardware but much more on the software)