[Asia Economy Reporter Koo Eun-mo] Apple unveiled new high-performance laptops, the 'MacBook Pro,' equipped with its own designed chips.
On the 18th (local time), Apple held a special streaming event at its headquarters, Apple Park, in Cupertino, California, USA, and announced two new MacBook Pro models: a 16-inch and a 14-inch version.
The MacBook Pro, Apple's premium laptop aimed at professionals, features Apple's newly designed high-performance chips, the 'M1 Pro' and 'M1 Max.' According to Apple, the M1 Pro and M1 Max are upgraded versions of the previously announced 'M1,' offering the most powerful performance among laptop chips while significantly reducing power consumption to enhance efficiency. The M1, introduced by Apple last year, dramatically reduced power consumption while delivering powerful performance, shaking up the PC industry and putting competitors like Intel and AMD on alert.
The M1 Pro features up to a 10-core central processing unit (CPU), making it 70% faster than the M1, and up to a 16-core graphics processing unit (GPU), which Apple says is twice as fast as the M1. It is equipped with a 16-core Neural Engine capable of performing 11 trillion operations per second and offers up to 32GB of unified memory. The M1 Pro also includes a high-performance media engine for video compression and playback, allowing multiple simultaneous playback of the highest quality video codec 'ProRes' 4K and 8K videos even when using only part of its performance.
The M1 Max, a higher-performance chip than the M1 Pro, is the chip with the largest architecture ever made, using 57 billion transistors. It features up to a 10-core CPU and up to a 32-core GPU, delivering GPU performance four times faster than the M1. The unified memory reaches up to 64GB. Compared to the 16GB video memory of the latest laptops, Apple stated this means professionals can now perform tasks on laptops that were previously impossible.
Apple also emphasized that despite the high performance, the M1 Pro and Max reduce power consumption, achieving the industry's highest performance per watt. For example, Apple explained that the CPU performance of the M1 Pro and Max is up to 1.7 times higher than that of an 8-core laptop chip consuming the same power. Thanks to this low-power performance, unlike other professional laptops whose performance drops when not connected to external power, the MacBook Pro maintains the same level of performance even when running on battery.
Additionally, the MacBook Pro enhances connectivity with ports such as HDMI, Thunderbolt 4, and an SDXC card slot, and it has revived the wireless charging feature MagSafe. Battery life reaches up to 17 hours of video playback for the 14-inch model and up to 21 hours for the 16-inch model.
The MacBook Pro equipped with the M1 Max chip can connect up to four monitors simultaneously, including three Pro Display XDR monitors and one 4K TV. It also features a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, a hi-fi 6-speaker sound system, and ProMotion technology with a variable refresh rate of 120Hz. The controversial 'Touch Bar' on the keyboard has been removed.
The MacBook Pro is available for order starting today and will be sold in stores from the 26th. Prices start at 2,690,000 KRW for the 14-inch model and 3,360,000 KRW for the 16-inch model.
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