Since its announcements at WWDC 2022, users have been wondering how much of an improvement the battery life is on laptops running the new M2 chip - well, it's already impressing testers.
Both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro were refreshed to have the M2 chip, the successor to Apple's Silicon efforts that it announced almost two years ago. The M1 chip and its subsequent spinoffs impressed with its speed, power and battery life, trouncing previous Macs with the Intel chips.
However, in our early testing of the M2 MacBook Pro, it came out with battery life that could easily last the working day, coming out with results of over 15 hours of battery life.
While this is obviously impressive, I'm not tempted to start saving for an M2 MacBook Pro. Rather, it's the not-even-released M3 Pro chip in a future MacBook Pro that I'll be interested to look into more when the time comes.
A 24-hour MacBook Pro doesn't seem far off
Apple's chip team has been on a roll since it announced the move from Intel chips to its own silicon. In my own tests when playing games in Parallels Desktop, I've been blown away by how well Metal Gear Solid V and others run at a 1440p resolution.
My MacBook Pro has the M1 Pro chip - something that's looking like the halfway point between the M1 and M2. This is mainly due to the extra cores mine has for graphics, compared to the M1, which is most likely why I'm getting great performance from my testing.
Yet the battery is still impressing me. I can have at least five apps running, six tabs open in both Chrome and Safari, and the Mac won't reach 10% after seven hours.
Inevitably I can see an M2 Pro chip arriving towards the end of 2022 as Apple looks to refresh the MacBook Pro line, with better speeds and an even better battery. We aren't far off from seeing a Mac running for a whole day, with the iPhones getting closer in that regard, and the M2 Pro could make this a reality.
But when I upgrade a device of mine, I like to skip a generation or more to make the most of the gains. This is why I went from an iPhone X to an iPhone 13 Pro in 2021.
Putting it in M3 gear
The speed at which Apple is improving upon the M1 chips and beyond is impressive, and while I can only speculate about the M3 Pro, I'd be confident in saying that this would be a substantial upgrade to users who want to game on the Mac. Especially with Metal 3 announced at WWDC, alongside Resident Evil Village and No Mans Sky arriving soon, there's plenty to look forward to.
I can see a time when using Parallels Desktop to play Metal Gear Solid V again, could result in a higher framerate at higher graphical settings, as if the game had been ported to macOS.
Granted, I'm happy with my MacBook Pro 14-inch; it's the best Mac I've owned in the twenty years I've owned an Apple computer.
However, we're approaching a point with these chips already where it's not an impossible scenario to imagine playing Metal Gear at its highest settings. And for me, that makes me excited for what my next Mac upgrade could bring when 2024 comes around.
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