The M2 MBP makes absolutely no sense

Sometimes this can be a strategy.
The existance of M2 Macbook Pro is to show people that the M2 Macbook Air is a bargain.
 
MajorFubar said:
It does, probably because it's the cheapest Macbook with Pro in the name, which holds a lot of kudos. Also there are certain people like @jav6454 who feel their needs justify the marginally-better power at the cost of battery life and weight, which is fair play. I'm definitely not here to ridicule anyone buying it, though as I've said, I personally don't see the point. If I wanted something better than the MBA I'd rather buy the 14".
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The clock speed isn't any faster if you have an Ultra chip. It makes a lot of sense in Ax chip machines to buy the cheapest one that fills your needs, but the marketing/product offerings kind of dresses it up in a way that makes you naturally gravitate toward buying more than you need.
 
It has its merits but definitely feels like the black sheep of the lineup. It's likely a stay of execution for the form factor until the newer chassis gets M2/Pro/Max/Ultra/Über/Beyond/Quantum et cetera.

Only reason I can think of to buy one is if you absolutely must have an actively cooled M2...now.
 
rm5 said:
Here's my take on this whole M2 MBP situation (I apologize if this has already been posted about)

The M2 MacBook Pro (and 13 inch MacBook Pros in general) is one of the weirdest and most worthless products that Apple sells. It still has the old design from 2016, while EVERY OTHER MACBOOK has had a redesign.

I think they are not paying any attention to the 13-inch MacBook Pro (the announcement lasted like 2 minutes). They will probably just discontinue it altogether in a few years.

You are paying at least $1300 for a 6-year-old design that still has the touch bar. Now, there is basically no gap whatsoever from the M2 MBA to the 13-inch MBP.

Here's my question/thought - What is the point of the 13-inch MacBook Pro anymore? All you get is 1 or 2 extra GPU cores and a fan. This didn't matter very much in the M1, so I don't think this will matter in the M2 either.

What do you think about this?
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I think #1 is supply chain optimization means Apple can produce these for cheap. There's probably a big stock of parts for the 13" pro, or at least very efficient/established production processes for these. This is an especially big deal these days with supply chain issues.

But consumer benefits I see are...

#2 - The fan. It is a big deal if you do work that requires sustained performance. My Macbook Air runs great, but it throttles when encoding really long videos, opening unreal engine projects to compile thousands of shaders, or doing anything that maxes out all CPUs for more than a few minutes.

#3 - The touch bar. Easy to forget that there are people who REALLY like it and are sad to see it go.

and #4 a bunch of little stuff like slightly more ports, slightly better battery life..
 
Enterprise. They buy them by truckload.
Look: it says “Pro”, it costs half of 14” MBp (imagine the bulk purchase discounts), and it’s available right now while a 14” says “9 weeks delivery”.
The company I work in still buys 13” Intel MacBooks that barely run Google Meet from external screen; M2 would be an insane upgrade.
 
not_anton said:
Enterprise. They buy them by truckload.
Look: it says “Pro”, it costs half of 14” MBp (imagine the bulk purchase discounts), and it’s available right now while a 14” says “9 weeks delivery”.
The company I work in is still buying Intel MacBook that barely run Google Meet from external screen; M2 would be an insane upgrade.
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Intel MacBooks? From where? Certainly not Apple.
 
not_anton said:
2020 13” Macbook Pro with 10-gen i5, runs out of battery after 1 hour of video call. Either this or Lenovo with Windows; we the cool software company give our employee the choice.
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I meant, how are they still buying them. They were delisted years ago.
 
not_anton said:
Enterprise. They buy them by truckload.
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I hear about this. But in all my years I've never come across any company that uses Macs in the kind of bulk purchase enterprise way I see PCs used. Gotta be mostly a US thing. In the UK, Government contractors delivering IT to all the Government Departments including the MOD, DWP and NHS are probably by far the biggest deployers of enterprise computers, and it's wall to wall PCs. Hundreds of thousands of them. Cue of course that one person who's bound to say "My company has 200 iMacs", but they're the exception.
 
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jav6454 said:
I meant, how are they still buying them. They were delisted years ago.
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I don’t know but we get them new. Maybe a contract for X laptops over Y years. I think they were afraid the IT infrastructure will have problems with M1 compatibility.
It sounds stupid for people who know about Apple computers, but there is a huge market for cheap MacBook Pros that does not care about the design, and where getting an M2 is good.
 
It actually makes less than zero sense. We're in the negatives here for comprehensibility. They changed nothing except the chip. They might as well just remove it from the lineup at this point. The Air for every day tasks and the occasional demanding tasks and the Pros for hardcore professional work. They could streamline their Macs at this point. The 13" MBP is in a very weird place that doesn't quite fit into the lineup.

Or it could just come down to them trying to get rid of their extra MBP inventory.
 
Cognizant. said:
It actually makes less than zero sense. We're in the negatives here for comprehensibility. They changed nothing except the chip. They might as well just remove it from the lineup at this point. The Air for every day tasks and the occasional demanding tasks and the Pros for hardcore professional work. They could streamline their Macs at this point. The 13" MBP is in a very weird place that doesn't quite fit into the lineup.

Or it could just come down to them trying to get rid of their extra MBP inventory.
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If fits in the lineup as a cheaper alternative to the 14" M1 Pro MBP...

Based on how they did things in the Intel days, the lineup SHOULD be the 13.5" MBA, a 14" M2 MBP that looks like the M1 Pro MBP but has two ports instead of four and an M2 instead of M1 Pro, then the M1 Pro MBP, etc. But if, say, they can't get enough of the screens for the 14" MBP but their supplier can make plenty of the older 13" screens, then this lets them increase their sales volume.

The 14"/16" MBPs are largely massively backordered everywhere, no? Apple.ca is telling me Aug. 11. My guess is that there is one component, whether it's screens, cameras or anything else, that's the bottleneck in production of those. And whatever that component is, it's not used in the 13" MBP.
 
VivienM said:
If fits in the lineup as a cheaper alternative to the 14" M1 Pro MBP...

Based on how they did things in the Intel days, the lineup SHOULD be the 13.5" MBA, a 14" M2 MBP that looks like the M1 Pro MBP but has two ports instead of four and an M2 instead of M1 Pro, then the M1 Pro MBP, etc. But if, say, they can't get enough of the screens for the 14" MBP but their supplier can make plenty of the older 13" screens, then this lets them increase their sales volume.

The 14"/16" MBPs are largely massively backordered everywhere, no? Apple.ca is telling me Aug. 11. My guess is that there is one component, whether it's screens, cameras or anything else, that's the bottleneck in production of those. And whatever that component is, it's not used in the 13" MBP.
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The backordered backlog is due to manufacturing being shut down.
 
Cognizant. said:
It actually makes less than zero sense. We're in the negatives here for comprehensibility. They changed nothing except the chip. They might as well just remove it from the lineup at this point. The Air for every day tasks and the occasional demanding tasks and the Pros for hardcore professional work. They could streamline their Macs at this point. The 13" MBP is in a very weird place that doesn't quite fit into the lineup.

Or it could just come down to them trying to get rid of their extra MBP inventory.
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Remove the touch bar????????? Your kidding right?????
 
Mark Gurman reported the other day that a 12” MacBook was in the works for late 2023. When it was subsequently followed by a tweet that this 12” model was going to be a MacBook Pro model à la PowerBook G4, it made me wonder if this is what Apple’s intending to replace the dated 13” MacBook Pro design with. Thoughts?
 
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