Apple surprise-launched 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models working on the company’s own M2 Pro and M2 Max chips or ‘pro silicon,’ as Apple calls these.

MacBook Pro notebooks are not for the faint-hearted. These are meant to tackle the most processor-demanding tasks from rendering graphic effects to movie editing, from app development to number crunching, or indeed anything that calls for sustained untiring power for workflows.

With the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, the capabilities shoot up. Apple promises that users looking to upgrade from Intel-based Mac models will experience dramatic improvements in performance, battery life, connectivity, and overall productivity.

“MacBook Pro with Apple silicon has been a game changer, empowering pros to push the limits of their workflows while on the go and do things they never thought possible on a laptop,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Today the MacBook Pro gets even better. With faster performance, enhanced connectivity, and the longest battery life ever in a Mac, along with the best display in a laptop, there’s simply nothing else like it.”

MacBook Pro with M2 Pro features a 10- or 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores for up to 20% greater performance than M1 Pro. With 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — double the amount in M2 — and up to 32GB of unified memory, this is meant to handle large projects and run multiple pro apps at high speed.

A next-gen GPU with up to 19 cores on board promises to deliver up to 30% more graphics performance, and the Neural Engine is, according to Apple, 40% faster, speeding up machine learning tasks like video analysis and image processing.

The MacBook Pro with the M2 Max chip pushes workflows to the extreme with a much larger GPU featuring up to 38 cores and delivering up to 30% greater graphics performance over M1 Max, and also includes 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — twice that of M2 Pro. With up to 96GB of unified memory, MacBook Pro, already the machine of choice for those dealing with graphics, includes more graphics memory to enable intensive graphics workloads, such as creating scenes with extreme 3D geometry and textures or merging massive photographic panoramas.

M2 Max has a next-gen 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency cores that deliver up to 20% greater performance over M1 Max, and a more powerful media engine than M2 Pro, with twice the ProRes acceleration to dramatically speed up media playback and transcoding.

The MacBook Pro now features Wi-Fi 6E3 for faster wireless connectivity, as well as more advanced HDMI, to support 8K displays up to 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz. These new capabilities add to the connectivity options already in MacBook Pro, including three Thunderbolt 4 ports for high-speed connection to peripherals, an SDXC card slot, and MagSafe 3 charging.

The new MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max are available to order immediately on the apple.com/in/store and in the Apple Store app in 27 countries and regions, including India. They will begin arriving to customers and will be in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorised Resellers starting Tuesday, January 24.

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at ₹1,99,900, and ₹1,84,900 for education; and the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at ₹2,49,900 and ₹2,29,900 for education.