At the 2023 WWDC, Apple has announced the release of a new 15 inch MacBook Air with M2 chip along with an updated M2 Mac Studio and finally added the Apple Silicon M2 chip to the Mac Pro.
The biggest news of the Worldwide Developers Conference event was of course the announcement of Apple’s new $3,599 Apple Vision Pro VR headset although it won’t be available until early 2024 and only in the USA.
The new MacBook Air and updated Mac Studio and Mac Pro however will be of more interest to Mac fans and here we take a look at them in more detail.
Pricing & Availability
The new Macs are available to order now and will begin shipping next week. The pricing for each model starts at:
- MacBook Air 15: $1299
- Mac Studio: $1999
- Mac Pro: $6999
M2 MacBook Air 15 inch
The new 15.3-inch MacBook Air has the latest M2 processor and is just 11.5mm thick, weighing only 1.36kg. This makes it the most powerful MacBook Air ever with Apple claiming it is 12 times faster than the MacBook Air with Intel chips.
Other features of the M2 MacBook Air 15 inch are:
- Two Thunderbolt 4 ports
- 3.5mm headphone jack are present
- MagSafe connector
- 1080p webcam
- Six-speaker audio system with force-cancelling woofers capable of spatial audio.
- Battery life is of up to 18 hours on a single charge
- Available in four colors: Silver, Space Grey, Starlight and Midnight
M2 Mac Studio
The original Mac Studio was released last year and the new version has the same design and connectivity but can now be ordered with either an M2 Max chip or the new M2 Ultra chip.
Even the base model new Mac Studio without the M2 Max or M2 Ultra chip is pretty powerful with a 12-core CPU and up to a 38-core GPU.
The Mac Studio with M2 Ultra chip has a 24-core CPU and up to 76-core GPU which Apple claims offer up to 20% and 30% performance improvements respectively compared to the M1 Ultra.
The M2 Max Mac Studio can be fitted with up to 96GB of unified memory and the M2 Ultra Mac Studio a whopping 192GB of unified memory.
The M2 Mac Studio also supports HDMI 2.1 for greater resolution support with the best external monitors for the Mac Studio.
You can also read our full M2 Mac Studio review.
M2 Mac Pro
The Mac Pro was the only Mac still using Intel chips but Apple has now finally added the Apple Silicon chip to it making it up to three times faster.
The Mac Pro now has Apple’s fastest M2 Ultra chip but unlike other Macs, also allows users to expand it with six additional PCIe Gen 4 cards.
The design is the same as the Intel version and is available in both desktop and rackmount chassis models.
Other features in the M2 Mac Pro include:
- Eight Thunderbolt 4 ports
- Two HDMI ports
- Three USB-A ports
- Dual 10Gb Ethernet ports
- WiFi 6E
- Bluetooth 5.3
- 3.5mm headphone jack
The new M2 Mac Pro can also support up to six of Apple’s incredibly powerful Pro Display XDR screens although there are much cheaper external displays available.
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