Best luxury buy Mac Pro
The finest notebooks money can buy
The Mac Pro is power. Pure, undiluted power. If you need the fastest, most capable Mac there is, the Mac Pro is for you – assuming you can afford it that is… The machine costs £7,199 and there’s only one off-the-shelf configuration for it (however, lots of custom options are available). The price doesn’t include a monitor, although you do get a mouse and a keyboard in the box (unlike the Mac mini and Mac Studio).
At the heart of the Mac Pro is the Apple silicon M2 Ultra system-on-a-chip (SoC). Built from two connected M2 Max chips, it has a 24-core CPU with 16 performance cores and eight efficiency cores, a 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. These figures are mindboggling,
The ultimate in power computing
especially when you consider you can upgrade them even further via th Apple Store’s build-to-order options.
You can’t add memory after buying the Mac Pro, but there are after-market upgrade options made possible by the six PCi slots (four PCIe x8 gen 4 slots and two PCIe x16 gen 4). If you need more storage you can add high-speed solidstate storage. The latest PCIe gen 4 SSD cards, for example, are capable of speeds of up to 26GB per second.
If you’re a video editor, AutoCAD designer or software developer – or just a big show-off – you’ll be glad to hear you can link up to eight 4K screens to your Mac Pro. If you need an even higher resolution, it can also handle up to six 6K monitors, or three at up to 8K. That’s a lot of screen real estate.
The Mac Pro is based on a tower system, with a rackmounted version available for £7,699. The tower measures 52.9cm high, 21.8cm wide and 45cm deep, so it’s best to keep it under your desk. There’s two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports atop the device, which are easily reachable when it’s on the floor.
The Mac Pro is for those with extreme computing needs. If you’re not sure if you need one, you probably don’t, but for those that do, it’s an amazing piece of kit.
The MacBook Pro is for anyone who wants more from their mobile Mac. Does it have more power? Obviously. More screen space? Probably. And more connectivity? Definitely!
There are eight MacBook Pro models in Apple’s current line-up; two 13-inch models, three with 14-inch screens and at the top of the range, three 16-inch laptops. To be honest, there’s little to commend the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Available in Space Grey or Silver, they’re powered by Apple M2 chips, the same as the MacBook Air, and they still have a Touch Bar, an irritating feature that never caught on. If you’re satisfied with this level of performance (and it’s no slouch), you might as well save yourself some money and buy either a 13-inch M2 MacBook Air or its 15-inch sibling instead.
The two cheaper 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have M2 Pro Apple silicon, with the top-of-the-range model in each size having an M2 Max. These are significantly more powerful than the standard M2. Even the entry level 14-inch MBP has a 10-core CPU, a 16-core GPU and 16GB of unified memory. At the other end of the scale, the most expensive 16-inch model has a 12-core CPU, a 38-core GPU and 32GB of unified memory. This is as powerful as it gets for a laptop, and is likely to be more than a match for all your mobile computing needs. The two cheapest models in each size have 512GB solid-state drives (SSDs), with the rest of the range sporting 1TB.
One of the main advantages enjoyed by the MacBook Pro is its connectivity
options. Unlike the MacBook Air, which is limited to two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports and a headphone jack, the 14- and 16-inch Pros have three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack. They also have MagSafe charging ports, something the 13-inch MacBook Pro lacks. They don’t, however, have USB-A ports (USB-A being the ‘regular’ USB port, long and rectangular in shape). There’s an HDMI port so you can connect an external display without adaptors, but if you have any USB-A peripherals you need to use with your MacBook Pro, it’s best to get a home or travel hub to give you even more connectivity options.
Bigger and better
You can only get a MacBook Pro – of any size – in Space Grey or Silver. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has up to 18 hours of battery life, rising to up to 22 hours for the 16-inch model, which is larger and can therefore house a bigger battery.
The MacBook Pro is for those who require more power than the MacBook Air can deliver. These days, your needs would have to be pretty high to fall into this category, but if you regularly use your laptop for computer-aided threedimensional design, intensive photo editing or multi-stream video production, you might find the MacBook Pro is more in line with your work.