Thank goodness Apple seems to be favoring performance lately. MBP battery life is already superb, so performance is very much where Apple's efforts should focus.
Note that unlike battery improvements, each performance improvement is functionally a real reduction in price, because users can do more without spending more. E.g. I paid similar ~$4k for loaded MBPs in 2011, 2017 and 2023. Similar price but each new box was many times stronger than the previous MBP.
It's only a real reduction in price if you actually need the extra performance. For many (most?) of us, even the base M1 chip is massive overkill. The
base price of the M2 machines
increased in price. So for those people who won't gain any real world gains from performance increases, there is
not a real reduction in price at all.
You ever been on a long haul flight? These laptops do definitely have epic battery life, but I'd love to see quite a lot more.
I strongly suspect that most users would actually gain a hell of a lot from increased battery performance, and nothing at all from increased core counts, and clock speed.
For my particular use case, a base M1 chip would be fine. However, I want the biggest laptop screen I can get, and also need more RAM than any of the laptops with base chips allow. Thus I had to get a MBP with M1 Pro chip to get the RAM I needed. I don't do any graphics work at all, and don't play games, so having an M1 with 8 GPU cores, or an M1 Max with 32 GPU cores would make absolutely zero difference to me. The 16" M1P MBP came with minimum chip spec of 10 CPU / 16 GPU cores. Can you see how annoying it is for me to have to pay extra for all these cores I will never use? The 16" M2P MBP came with minimum chip spec of 12 CPU / 19 GPU cores, and a price bump. Can you see how I would get absolutely zero "real reduction in price" if I were to upgrade? However, the M2 MBP's came with increased battery life, and that would be pretty sweet. I also have to pay for a fan and thicker case, and yet in the year or so of daily use, the fans have never spun up once. I've seen YT reviews, and the reviewers are having to go to insane lengths to throw enough graphics tasks at these machines to even get the fans to spin up. What I am saying is that there are two types of users, those that still need more and more power, especially with the GPU's, and those that don't even need the power of the most basic M1 chip, but do want all the other improvements, such as increased battery, spec bumps to port versions, improved screen and sound, etc.
I will be really interested if the base M3 chip allows even more RAM than 24GB. The 15" MBA is a machine I would love.... but only if it came with a 16" screen, instead of 15", gah.
