APPLE SILICON
Goodbye 13-Inch MacBook Pro. Hello Entry-Level MacBook
The latest Apple leaks lead to only one logical conclusion
This week’s report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has Apple testing a new “entry-level MacBook Pro with an M2 chip, codenamed J493”. That statement brought to mind what Luke Skywalker said to Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi on the barren mineral planet Crait, “Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.”
Okay, it’s not that bad. Gurman appears to have solid information that Apple is testing a new laptop with an M2 chip. The problem is his claim that this new laptop will be an entry-level MacBook Pro, a product that no longer makes sense in a world with Apple silicon.
In May of 2019, Apple updated the entry-level MacBook Pro with an 8th generation “Coffee Lake” Intel “Core i5” processor. Two months later, the MacBook Air was also updated to an 8th generation “Coffee Lake” Intel “Core i5” processor. But while the MacBook Pro got a U-series processor (i5–8279U), the MacBook Air got the Y-series variant (i5-8210Y). Because the Intel Y-series processor was extremely low power, the MacBook Air was able to run cooler, quieter, and with better battery life. But it only scored 1501 on the GeekBench 5 multi-core test while the MacBook Pro scored 3895.
