Apple announced M2 Pro MacBook Pros today—and, at long last, a long-awaited CPU bump for the Mac Mini, stuck on the M1 for more than two years now.
M2 Pro brings pro-level performance to Mac mini for the first time. Featuring up to a 12-core CPU with eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, along with up to a 19-core GPU, M2 Pro has 200GB/s of memory bandwidth — double the amount in M2 — and supports up to 32GB of memory. The next-generation Neural Engine is 40 percent faster than M1, speeding up ML tasks like video analysis and image processing. Designed to dramatically accelerate video playback and encoding while using very little power, M2 Pro offers a powerful media engine, which speeds through the most popular video codecs and can simultaneously play up to five streams of 8K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps, or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps. The M2 Pro-powered model is up to 14x faster than the fastest Intel-based Mac mini.3
These are very nice computers.
Suprised they're still selling these with 8GB, which seems a bad deal even at $599. And upgrades price up fast—I don't think I could recommend any configuration under $999 (16GB, 512GB SSD). Once you get to the M2 Pro with 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, you're looking at $1699—though that's still $300 cheaper than a similarly equipped Mac Studio (M1 Max, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD), if only $100 cheaper than the same model refurbished, available right now from Apple itself. Note that M2 models (including laptops) max out at 24GB.
