I love my Apple MacBook Air with the M1 chip. It is easily the best laptop I’ve owned…until today. The M1 Air is still one of the faster small laptops you can get. It’s light, there’s no fans to distract, and it will go all day long. The screen is good and sound as well. The downside to all of this thin, light beauty: you get exactly two Thunderbolt ports, and tough s#!t if you want more. You have to buy an external dock to get USB or HDMI or SDXC card support For the most part, that’s not an issue, but I use the laptop at my workplace (a high school) and sometimes I want to show a movie or pull something up that isn’t on the Google crapps that we use at the school. Oh, gee — I forgot the dock, so no HDMI connection. It’s a small thing, but it was enough that when i realized my gear was three years old it might be time to upgrade. (It’s not really necessary, that Air is still plenty fast and has plenty of battery life.)

Enter the MacBook Pro 14″. I looked at the new Airs and they’re nice but not enough to get me off the old 13″ Air. The Pros, on the other hand had three things to attract: the standard machine had twice the SSD (512 GB) and RAM (16 GB), it had an HDMI and SDXC card port, two Thunderbolt ports that honestly should have been left out for a USB port, but the big one — the MagSafe power cable. This was a great thing in the old Intel MacBooks and getting rid of it (and I understand the power and data thing of Thunderbolt — yes, it’s good) was a mistake, as anyone who trips over their cord and pulls their $1000 machine off a table or desk and attest to.

Performance: It’s fast. I transferred the whole of my old Air in under 40 minutes using the Thunderbolt cable. Audio and video playback is fast and smooth, even over the internet. The M2 Pro chip is supposed to have a 10-core CPU and 16 core GPU with a 16 core Neural Engine — that’s for the spec-happy folks. For those that don’t do the technospeak: it’s really, really fast for most things. I did a couple of quick page layouts and mock-ups through Adobe and had no slow down. A bunch of open tabs in Safari and a couple of open documents in Pages, and running a movie — no slow down. It’s good.

It’s got the new WiFi6, but my network doesn’t; when you fire up a new MacBook Pro, you might have issues connecting where it shows you are online in the icon in the top bar, but keep getting a “you’re not connected to the internet” warning. Apparently, it doesn’t figure this out on its own. It can run up to two external displays, plays Video in HDR, ProRes and Dolby; the sound is great and will do Dolby Plus. The trackpad is quick and responsive, the keyboard is quiet and on par with the old Air for comfort and response. I did find the higher front end took some getting used to, but I do seem to type better.

Other than the annoying bezel cut on the top of the screen for the 1080p Facetime camera, the screen is big and bright. The colors are amazing — I pulled up the 2008 Speed Racer to get an idea of how it handled color and wow! does it do color. (Apple’s claiming a billion colors.) It’s a Liquid Retina XDR display with 3024-by-1964 resolution, and a claimed peak 1600 nits brightness in HDR. Sound is good and delivered by two speakers on either side of the keyboard. I think this is where the M2 Pro really shines.

The size isn’t radically larger than the Air — about the same thickness as the back edge of the Air, but all over; it doesn’t taper at 0.6 inches. The width is a good half inch or so wider at 12.3″, and it’s a bit deeper at 8.7 inches. It weighs in at a claimed 3.5 pounds — about a half pound more than the Air. I carry my laptop to work and back on a motorcycle most days; I like light. This is noticeably heavier. It’s not some POS HP laptop my workplace would saddle me with, however. With the dock, power cables and other stuff i would carry with the Air, it probably came out to about the same weight.

So, is it worth it? On the fence on this one. I like having the HDMI and SDXC access — I use it. The lack of USB is disappointing. The rest of the machine is fantastic, but compared to the excellent MacBook Air 13″ with the M1 chip — is it twice the machine for twice the cost? No. It’s a great laptop, no doubt, but I think Apple’s pricing is a bit…enthusiastic. If you’re looking for a workaday computer — grab an M1 MacBook Air; if you need something with a bit of firepower, however, and between desktop publishing and other data-pushing I do, the Pro is probably a better choice.

(Update: I’ve had the MacBook Pro for a few days now and the experience has been steadily better. The annoying bezel for the camera tends to fade into the background if you are concentrating on your work, but man — it’s ugly. And on a laptop this good-looking that stands out. I’ve dragged it around with me on the motorcycle and it’s not noticeably more heavy than the Air was. The battery life is excellent, but Zoom meetings eat! the battery. I was losing 10% of the battery per hour while teaching an online class, although the students did comment that the camera was giving a much better picture…I’m not sure that was a good thing for the poor wretches to see. Watching movies, working on the internet and in Pages and Adobe eat the power at a much more reasonable speed. I’m down about 10% over two hours or so of work, so the claimed 18 hour battery time seems about right. The Magsafe power box loaded up the battery from 20% to full in about an hour and a half. That means the quick charge and the battery life are about on par with the MacBook Air, which seems reasonable, even with the increase in computational firepower. I still think it’s about $300 too expensive, but it’s a good machine.)