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

Apple has announced the M2 soc and the first laptop to have the new soc. That’s a new version of the MacBook Air and a new version of 13″ MacBook Pro. The latter is just 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 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 allows 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 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 specbump of the previous version, with an older design and a 13″ screen without a notch. The new version, just like the Air, has the M2 soc on board. The Air comes out for 1519 euros, the new Pro costs from 1619 euros.

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

The GPU in the M2 has ten cores, good for 3.6 teraflops. Apple claims that there is a larger L2 cache, but does not mention how large it is. The soc can encode and decode 8k images and also has support for ProRes video.