New MacBook Air and 13″ variant of MacBook Pro get Apple M2-soc

Apple has announced the M2 soc and the first laptop that will have the new soc. That’s a new version of the MacBook Air and a new version of the 13″ MacBook Pro. The latter is only a specbump.

The new Air has four ports: a MagSafe connector for charging, two Thunderbolt ports on the left, and a 3.5mm jack on the right. There is also a Touch ID fingerprint scanner again and the manufacturer itself emphasizes the light weight and thin design. The laptop is 11.3 mm thick and weighs 1.23 kilograms.

The 13.6″ LCD has a notch for the front camera that enables video calling with 1080p resolution. Previous laptops have a 720p video function. The new Air also has a Magic Keyboard. Like the version with M1, it is a design without fans. Apple claims a battery life of up to eighteen hours. The Air can contain a maximum of a 2TB SSD. It is not yet clear what the minimum storage is. The memory is a maximum of 24GB.

The new MacBook Pro is a spec bump of the previous version, with an older design and a 13-inch screen without a notch. The new version, like the Air, has the M2 soc on board. The Air will be released for 1519 euros, the new Pro will cost from 1619 euros.

That M2-soc is made at 5nm and contains 20 billion transistors. That is more than the M1, but less than the M1 Pro, Max and Ultra. The M2 uses lpddr5 memory and a maximum of 24GB fits on the soc. There are four processor cores for performance and four economy cores. The performance cores share 16MB of cache.

The GPU in the M2 has ten cores, good for 3.6 teraflops. Apple claims there is a larger L2 cache, but doesn’t say how big it is. The soc can encode and decode 8k images and also has support for ProRes video.