Apple has announced a new range of MacBook Pro and Mac mini products as well as new additions to its silicon chips in the M2 Pro and M2 Max.
The latest MacBook Pros are available to order in Aotearoa from today before they are released here next week, starting at $3699 for the 14-inch and $4599 for the 16-inch.
The new iterations look nearly identical to the previous models from the outside, but the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips promise a significant power boost over their predecessors, which will be of interest for users who do a lot of video editing or 3D rendering.
They also offer battery life of up to 22 hours, Apple said - the longest battery life yet offered in a Mac.
Apple said rendering titles and animations using the Motion app is up to 80 percent faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro, and it gets even more powerful with the M2 Max.
"MacBook Pro with M2 Max pushes workflows to the extreme with a much larger GPU featuring up to 38 cores and delivering up to 30 percent greater graphics performance over M1 Max, and also includes 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth - twice that of M2 Pro," Apple said in a media release.
"With up to 96GB of unified memory, MacBook Pro once again pushes the limits of graphics memory in a laptop to enable intensive graphics workloads, such as creating scenes with extreme 3D geometry and textures, or merging massive photographic panoramas. M2 Max has a next-gen 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores that delivers up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Max, and a more powerful media engine than M2 Pro, with twice the ProRes acceleration to dramatically speed up media playback and transcoding."
Getting the maximum power and size offered in the new MacBook Pro lineup of course won't come cheap. On the Apple NZ website, the 16-inch model with M2 Max with a 38‑core GPU, 96GB of unified memory and an 8TB SSD is currently asking for $11,599.
Apple's latest laptops have been announced shortly after several new Windows laptops were unveiled at CES 2022, among which the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i and LG Gram Style in particular impressed tech media.
As for Apple's latest desktop computer, the new Mac mini comes with either an M2 or M2 Pro chip and starts at $1099. It is also available to order today before arriving to New Zealand customers and retail stores on January 24.
