The 2021 MacBook Pro: A Balance of Performance and Style

The latest addition to Apple's MacBook lineup is the 2021 MacBook Pro, which has made some significant changes compared to its predecessors. One notable change is the shift away from the traditional wedge-shaped design, opting instead for a slightly more boxy shape that strikes a better balance between performance and style. The wider sides of the laptop allow Apple to bring back some ports that were previously removed, including two Thunderbolt ports and a headphone jack with support for high-impedance headphones.

On the left side of the machine, you'll find the MagSafe 3 connector for charging, as well as two Thunderbolt ports. On the right side, there's a full-size SD card slot, another Thunderbolt port, and an HDMI 2.1 port. This upgrade to HDMI 2.1 brings higher resolutions and refresh rates, supporting up to 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz. While other laptops may offer more ports, this is the first time in over five years that I've had a laptop with an HDMI port and an SD card slot built-in, and I'm glad to have them back.

The Identical Design: A Continued Notch

One design aspect that hasn't changed is the large notch for the 1080p FaceTime camera. The MacBook Pro still hasn't adopted face ID or other features to justify the large cutout, but as I've mentioned in previous videos, once you start really using the machine, you basically forget it's there. The menu bar helps to hide it in the slightly taller aspect ratio, preventing content from being covered by it.

In terms of camera quality, an average person won't run into any issues with the current setup. However, a separate webcam or using your iPhone's camera through Continuity will be a big step up in quality. On the other hand, the microphone on the laptop is impressive, with Apple referring to it as "studio-quality" due to its three-mic array and directional beam-forming technology. This allows for good, clear audio from the user while blocking out other nearby sounds.

The Keyboard: A Tactile Experience

The keyboard on the MacBook Pro continues what you'd expect from a MacBook keyboard – there isn't too much travel distance, but the mechanical keyboard offers a more tactile experience. As with many things, there's a lot of personal choice in what makes a good keyboard, and I've found that the typing experience on this laptop is certainly better than some of Apple's previous butterfly keyboards.

I also appreciate the styling of the black background behind the keys rather than bare metal. The touch ID built into the keyboard is also very handy to unlock the computer if you're not wearing your Apple watch. Gaming on the MacBook Pro isn't exactly a strong suit, as it seems to be limited by the operating system. While you can play Minecraft and other games, there's just no way to see Max as gaming machines until more modern AAA games start supporting Mac OS.

Conclusion

The M2 MacBook Pro is the right laptop for me, and I've enjoyed using it over the past month. It will continue to be my laptop going forward, but if you're looking at alternatives, the M1 Pro or M1 Max MacBook Air could also be a great option – especially if you're willing to go with a used laptop.

I hope this video helped you out, and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel for more content from 9 to 5 Mac.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI've been using the new 14-inch MacBook Pro for over a month now it's a great machine and a solid step up from the MacBook Air I had before it I already gave some initial thoughts on the laptop and did a comparison to the air but here are my full thoughts now that I've really had some Hands-On time with it before I go into my thoughts on the laptop I want to get the specs out of the way so I can focus on the user experience the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts off with the M2 Pro chip with a 10 core CPU and a 16 core GPU it can be configured up to the M2 Max chip with a 12 core CPU and a 38 core GPU on the RAM and storage side of things it starts off with 16 gigabytes of RAM and is configurable up to 96 and the storage ranges from 512 gigabytes up to 8 terabytes the larger 16 inch version of the laptop has all those same configuration options but a higher starting price of 24.99 compared to the 14 inch versions 1999. it also has more GPU cores on the base M2 Pro chip throughout most of the laptop not much has changed from the previous generation when the M1 chips first arrived for the MacBook Pro the device saw a major redesign to strike a better balance of Form and Function and that balance thankfully continues now to focus on the user experience I want to start by talking about a use case that most people can relate to content consumption so the screen and audio performance the fortunage MacBook Pro has a six speaker array with Force canceling woofers and they sound excellent it has much better bass than the MacBook Air and the proper speaker grades and ports provide good stereo separation to make for a surprisingly good music listening experience Apple also talks about the Dolby Atmos and spatialized audio support with the speakers the laptop's built-in speakers definitely don't compare to the directionality and immersion you can get from a true surround setup if you want good spatial audio with a laptop you're better off using the HDMI out to get multi-channel audio or using airpods with modern airpods the 14-inch MacBook Pro supports not just spatialized audio but head tracked spatialized audio this lets the direction the sound is coming from seem to stay in place even as you turn your head it can be cool especially with movies where sound is such an important part of the storytelling experience so I understand why some people like to have that enabled but for me the extra processing done to emulate a surround sound experience doesn't lead to a sound that I prefer and I even find the head tracked audio a bit jarring things like FaceTime using spatialized audio definitely seem more annoying than helpful for me thankfully it is pretty easy to either disable head tracking or just disable spatialized audio altogether when you have your airpods connected I won't complain about extra features being available for those who want them even if I won't find myself using them because your experience with spatialized audio with airpods could be different continuing with the media consumption experience you have the screen it may not be a 4K or 8K panel but in a laptop of this size that resolution isn't necessary anyway the screen is 3024 by 1964 pixels for a total of 254 pixels per inch plenty for a screen of this size but it is just a 14 inch screen if you're in a dorm room and intent to use your laptop as one of your only content consumption devices stepping up to the larger 16 inch screen could be worth it to feel immersed in a movie like you would at a theater you have to be pretty close to the screen but you could find that worth the trade-offs as the MacBook Pro screen is very good it's a mini LED type display so unlike more typical LCDs which have a backlight that illuminates the whole screen at once it has thousands of tiny LEDs that can illuminate different sections of the screen different amounts this lets brighter elements on the screen get extra bright up to 1600 nits with HDR content while allowing dark elements on the screen to be darker the whole screen Max HDR brightness is a thousand nits and with SDR content it'll top out at 500. the high HDR brightness is great as it lets light and bright objects really shine on the screen while still providing plenty of detail and darker scenes this High brightness leads to a really good HDR experience though not quite as good as some oleds with the mini LED display while each Zone can adjust its backlight brightness the zone is larger than the individual pixel so if you have a very bright object on a dark background you could see a bit of glow around that which is referred to as bloom when you're watching normal content it's not noticeable but if you're in a dark room with your brightness turned way up and you have white elements on a dark background you can notice it in my use though the only times I saw the bloom was when I was specifically looking for it as you can expect from Apple the panel supports the wide P3 color space and true tone to adjust the color temperature of the screen to match your environment so it won't look too blue or yellow for whatever lighting you have in your room I personally prefer to keep true tone off so the display's color remains consistent but your mileage may vary Additionally the MacBook Pro has the variable refresh rate technology Apple refers to as Pro motion so it supports refresh rates up to 120 hertz to offer a smoother experience when using the machine and allowing that refresh rate to match that with the content you're watching normally if you're watching 24fps content like movies on a 60hz panel without variable refresh rate it has to display one frame twice in the next frame three times in order to fit the 24 frames per second into the 60 hertz of the screen the uneven amount of time each frame is displayed will result in judder with this display it can just run at 48 Hertz so that each frame is displayed for an identical amount of time this difference isn't something most people will notice but if you're particularly susceptible to noticing it the reduction in Jetter on the MacBook Pros display is really nice to have all in all the MacBook Pro is an excellent content consumption device the screen looks great and the speakers sound great with the biggest downside just being the size of the display but it's what you'd expect from a laptop and it has excellent portability so it can hardly be considered a drawback now before we get into the next section leave a like let me know in the comments down below if you're enjoying the video so far While most people consume content being a Pro laptop plenty of people choose to upgrade to the MacBook Pro to produce content so how does it hold up there pretty well I've been doing all my video editing on the MacBook Pro and it's done an excellent job with Apple's M2 Pro chip inside and a fantastic media engine that supports Hardware acceleration for h.264 h.265 prores and prores raw whatever media type you're working with the laptop will handle it well even on the base spec with a 512 gig SSD and 16 gigs of RAM I haven't had any major slowdowns only twice so far if I actually heard the fan ramp up to keep the chip cool while under a heavy load and I work in Premiere so people working with Apple's own Final Cut Pro may have better optimization and an even smoother experience due to that close integration I've certainly considered giving Final Cut a try but I haven't been able to make the jump quite yet now when editing video or photos color accuracy is pretty important while by no means is the built-in display a reference monitor it's plenty accurate for basic video and photo work with different profiles depending on the color space you're working in if you're really worried about color accuracy you can grab a calibration tool to adjust your built-in display and any external displays to match the M2 Pro MacBook Pro also supports two external displays simultaneously you can output 8K 60hz or 4K 240Hz from the HDMI port or two 6K 60hz streams from the Thunderbolt ports if you choose to upgrade to the M2 Max chip you can output to three displays at once for an even more impressive multi-monitor setup I'm a big proponent to the value of multiple monitors so the native support for more displays as well as the HDMI port for higher resolutions and faster refresh rates is really valuable to me the power of the laptop and its excellent screen will make it a good fit for photo editing in Photoshop or Lightroom I haven't experienced any issues or slowdowns in my time editing or exporting Raw photos I've taken at rocket launches of course a pro machine will need to be powerful so let's talk about its performance in some benchmarks if you don't care about benchmark scores I totally understand feel free to skip to here in the video to bypass all these numbers and just get on with the review I started off with geekbench geekbench runs a number of different tests covering things from data compression and image processing to machine learning to get an overall idea of the everyday performance of the system running geekbench 6 on the CPU it gets a single core score of 2660 and a multi-core score of 12 109. comparing it to some other CPUs that puts it roughly on par with the single core score of the Core I5 13600k or the core I9 12900ks multi-core wise it's closer to the ryzen 5 7600 or the core i5 12600 KF of course those processors were in desktop computers and the M2 Pro is in a laptop and drawing far less power but for the interest of the benchmarks I'm just focusing on Raw performance right now running a compute Benchmark through metal API it gets 73 287 while running it through opencl gets a score of 43 209. now you may notice the tests on screen don't exactly match the numbers I'm saying that's just because I ran the test without screen recording in order to get the most accurate results and then I ran them again while recording in order to have something to show on screen these scores may not beat out all the other CPUs and gpus out there but as with all things it's a balance Apple's arm-based processor has a low power consumption and excellent efficiency leading to excellent battery life now there is one way the performance on the 2023 MacBook Pro is actually a drop from the last generation and that's the SSD they doubled the capacity of the nand modules which sounds like a good thing but because they didn't also upgrade the base storage to one terabyte the base 512 gigabyte model now has just two nand chips while the previous generation had four this leads to a decreased SSD speed from the M1 equivalent still these speeds are good all things considered Blackmagic disk Speed Test shows a read speed around 3 300 megabytes a second and a write speed of nearly 3 000 megabytes a second since the base model has 16 gigabytes of RAM unlike the MacBook Air which starts out with just eight you're far less likely to use Swap and therefore less likely to notice any real world changes as a result of the slower SSD now switching over to the blender Benchmark 3.4.0 which tests rendering and how fast the system can process samples testing the CPU cores on the M2 prochip led to a score of just 199.48 while running the test on the GPU it received 657.07 the CPU performance was really close to that of the M1 Max finally running cinebench R23 with a multi-core test the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 prochip received 11723 and in a single core test it got 1631 not reaching the scores of xeons and threadrippers but beating out the core i5 11600 KF and about on par with the ryzen 5 5600x again it's worth noting that it's competing against desktop class products here and the power draw is just over 30 Watts while some of these competing products are drawing well over 100 Watts by the way if you have any other benchmarks you'd be interested in let me know in the comments below and I'll see about adding it to our list for all future reviews all right so I've covered content consumption and some more professional workloads now but what about just general everyday use as I've said before the laptop carries over the design from the previous generation when the 2021 MacBook Pro came out it switched from a design focused wedge shape to a slightly more boxy shape that I think strikes a better balance of performance and style The Wider sides let Apple bring back some ports they'd previously removed in this new generation saw some improvements on the left side we've got the magsafe 3 connector for charging up two Thunderbolt ports and a headphone jack with support for high impedance headphones over on the right side of the machine there's a full-size SD card slot another Thunderbolt port and an HDMI 2.1 port as I touched on previously this upgrade to HDMI 2.1 brings higher resolutions and refresh rates supporting up to 8K 60hz or 4K 240 hertz while there are certainly other laptops that have more to offer in terms of ports this is the first time in more than five years that I've had a laptop with an HDMI port and an SD card slot built in and I am so glad to have them back it seems minor but it's one more adapter I'd have to keep track of I already carry around an adapter for cfast cards and CF Express cards so that's just one more thing I can leave at home one negative from The Identical design is the continued existence of a large Notch for the 1080p FaceTime camera the MacBook Pro still hasn't gained face ID or other features to help justify the large cutout but as I've said in some previous videos once you start really using the machine you basically forget it's there the menu bar helps to hide it in the slightly taller aspect ratio prevents content from being covered by it as far as the camera goes an average person definitely won't run into any issues with it if perfectly adequate for video meetings or FaceTime calls but a separate webcam or using your iPhone's camera through continuity camera will be a big step up in quality the microphone on the laptop however is pretty outstanding Apple refers to the three mic array as studio quality news's directional beam forming to get good clear audio from the user while blocking out other nearby sounds I've been really impressed with the microphone it really does have a studio type sound to it blocking out pretty much any of the room tone this is the onboard audio from the MacBook Pro's array of microphones go ahead and let me know what you think in the comments down below the keyboard continues what you'd expect from a MacBook keyboard there isn't too much travel distance and the mechanical keyboard certainly offers a more tactile experience but as with so many things there's a lot of personal choice in what makes a good keyboard I like the typing experience on the MacBook Pro and it's certainly much better than the butterfly keyboards Apple faced out a few years ago I also quite like the styling of the black background behind the keys rather than bare metal the touch ID built into the keyboard is also very handy to unlock the computer if for whatever reason I'm not wearing my Apple watch as I've mentioned throughout the review the efficiency with apple silicon is fantastic leading to excellent battery life the 16 inch version will last even longer but whether I was on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro any of the laptops last long enough on battery that I don't have to think about bringing a charger with me when I'm leaving the home I was gonna try to talk about gaming but there really isn't too much to talk about it isn't the power of the MacBook Pro holding it back but the operating system you can play Minecraft League of Legends and other games but there's just no way to see Max as gaming machines until more modern AAA games start supporting Mac OS if you want to play some retro games you can always emulate the system and older games could work if you're playing through a Windows Virtual Machine using software like parallels but Macs just don't compare to Windows machines or gaming consoles for the time being hopefully that will change while I've stayed pretty focused on the M2 MacBook Pro here of course it doesn't exist in a bubble the MacBook Air while less powerful and it has less connectivity is still a great laptop and it packs a great punch for its size and its base price is also 800 less expensive if you think that could be a good option for you check out my comparison video the last generation MacBook Pro could also be a great option especially if you're willing to go with a used laptop the M1 Pro or M1 Max micro Pro could be a fantastic value outperforming the more modern M2 MacBook Air in the same form factor as the current MacBook Pro the M2 Pro MacBook Pro is the right laptop for me I've enjoyed using it the past month and it will continue to be my laptop going forward I hope this video helped you out if it did consider leaving a like leave your thoughts in the comments down below and subscribe to the channel for more from nine to five MacI've been using the new 14-inch MacBook Pro for over a month now it's a great machine and a solid step up from the MacBook Air I had before it I already gave some initial thoughts on the laptop and did a comparison to the air but here are my full thoughts now that I've really had some Hands-On time with it before I go into my thoughts on the laptop I want to get the specs out of the way so I can focus on the user experience the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts off with the M2 Pro chip with a 10 core CPU and a 16 core GPU it can be configured up to the M2 Max chip with a 12 core CPU and a 38 core GPU on the RAM and storage side of things it starts off with 16 gigabytes of RAM and is configurable up to 96 and the storage ranges from 512 gigabytes up to 8 terabytes the larger 16 inch version of the laptop has all those same configuration options but a higher starting price of 24.99 compared to the 14 inch versions 1999. it also has more GPU cores on the base M2 Pro chip throughout most of the laptop not much has changed from the previous generation when the M1 chips first arrived for the MacBook Pro the device saw a major redesign to strike a better balance of Form and Function and that balance thankfully continues now to focus on the user experience I want to start by talking about a use case that most people can relate to content consumption so the screen and audio performance the fortunage MacBook Pro has a six speaker array with Force canceling woofers and they sound excellent it has much better bass than the MacBook Air and the proper speaker grades and ports provide good stereo separation to make for a surprisingly good music listening experience Apple also talks about the Dolby Atmos and spatialized audio support with the speakers the laptop's built-in speakers definitely don't compare to the directionality and immersion you can get from a true surround setup if you want good spatial audio with a laptop you're better off using the HDMI out to get multi-channel audio or using airpods with modern airpods the 14-inch MacBook Pro supports not just spatialized audio but head tracked spatialized audio this lets the direction the sound is coming from seem to stay in place even as you turn your head it can be cool especially with movies where sound is such an important part of the storytelling experience so I understand why some people like to have that enabled but for me the extra processing done to emulate a surround sound experience doesn't lead to a sound that I prefer and I even find the head tracked audio a bit jarring things like FaceTime using spatialized audio definitely seem more annoying than helpful for me thankfully it is pretty easy to either disable head tracking or just disable spatialized audio altogether when you have your airpods connected I won't complain about extra features being available for those who want them even if I won't find myself using them because your experience with spatialized audio with airpods could be different continuing with the media consumption experience you have the screen it may not be a 4K or 8K panel but in a laptop of this size that resolution isn't necessary anyway the screen is 3024 by 1964 pixels for a total of 254 pixels per inch plenty for a screen of this size but it is just a 14 inch screen if you're in a dorm room and intent to use your laptop as one of your only content consumption devices stepping up to the larger 16 inch screen could be worth it to feel immersed in a movie like you would at a theater you have to be pretty close to the screen but you could find that worth the trade-offs as the MacBook Pro screen is very good it's a mini LED type display so unlike more typical LCDs which have a backlight that illuminates the whole screen at once it has thousands of tiny LEDs that can illuminate different sections of the screen different amounts this lets brighter elements on the screen get extra bright up to 1600 nits with HDR content while allowing dark elements on the screen to be darker the whole screen Max HDR brightness is a thousand nits and with SDR content it'll top out at 500. the high HDR brightness is great as it lets light and bright objects really shine on the screen while still providing plenty of detail and darker scenes this High brightness leads to a really good HDR experience though not quite as good as some oleds with the mini LED display while each Zone can adjust its backlight brightness the zone is larger than the individual pixel so if you have a very bright object on a dark background you could see a bit of glow around that which is referred to as bloom when you're watching normal content it's not noticeable but if you're in a dark room with your brightness turned way up and you have white elements on a dark background you can notice it in my use though the only times I saw the bloom was when I was specifically looking for it as you can expect from Apple the panel supports the wide P3 color space and true tone to adjust the color temperature of the screen to match your environment so it won't look too blue or yellow for whatever lighting you have in your room I personally prefer to keep true tone off so the display's color remains consistent but your mileage may vary Additionally the MacBook Pro has the variable refresh rate technology Apple refers to as Pro motion so it supports refresh rates up to 120 hertz to offer a smoother experience when using the machine and allowing that refresh rate to match that with the content you're watching normally if you're watching 24fps content like movies on a 60hz panel without variable refresh rate it has to display one frame twice in the next frame three times in order to fit the 24 frames per second into the 60 hertz of the screen the uneven amount of time each frame is displayed will result in judder with this display it can just run at 48 Hertz so that each frame is displayed for an identical amount of time this difference isn't something most people will notice but if you're particularly susceptible to noticing it the reduction in Jetter on the MacBook Pros display is really nice to have all in all the MacBook Pro is an excellent content consumption device the screen looks great and the speakers sound great with the biggest downside just being the size of the display but it's what you'd expect from a laptop and it has excellent portability so it can hardly be considered a drawback now before we get into the next section leave a like let me know in the comments down below if you're enjoying the video so far While most people consume content being a Pro laptop plenty of people choose to upgrade to the MacBook Pro to produce content so how does it hold up there pretty well I've been doing all my video editing on the MacBook Pro and it's done an excellent job with Apple's M2 Pro chip inside and a fantastic media engine that supports Hardware acceleration for h.264 h.265 prores and prores raw whatever media type you're working with the laptop will handle it well even on the base spec with a 512 gig SSD and 16 gigs of RAM I haven't had any major slowdowns only twice so far if I actually heard the fan ramp up to keep the chip cool while under a heavy load and I work in Premiere so people working with Apple's own Final Cut Pro may have better optimization and an even smoother experience due to that close integration I've certainly considered giving Final Cut a try but I haven't been able to make the jump quite yet now when editing video or photos color accuracy is pretty important while by no means is the built-in display a reference monitor it's plenty accurate for basic video and photo work with different profiles depending on the color space you're working in if you're really worried about color accuracy you can grab a calibration tool to adjust your built-in display and any external displays to match the M2 Pro MacBook Pro also supports two external displays simultaneously you can output 8K 60hz or 4K 240Hz from the HDMI port or two 6K 60hz streams from the Thunderbolt ports if you choose to upgrade to the M2 Max chip you can output to three displays at once for an even more impressive multi-monitor setup I'm a big proponent to the value of multiple monitors so the native support for more displays as well as the HDMI port for higher resolutions and faster refresh rates is really valuable to me the power of the laptop and its excellent screen will make it a good fit for photo editing in Photoshop or Lightroom I haven't experienced any issues or slowdowns in my time editing or exporting Raw photos I've taken at rocket launches of course a pro machine will need to be powerful so let's talk about its performance in some benchmarks if you don't care about benchmark scores I totally understand feel free to skip to here in the video to bypass all these numbers and just get on with the review I started off with geekbench geekbench runs a number of different tests covering things from data compression and image processing to machine learning to get an overall idea of the everyday performance of the system running geekbench 6 on the CPU it gets a single core score of 2660 and a multi-core score of 12 109. comparing it to some other CPUs that puts it roughly on par with the single core score of the Core I5 13600k or the core I9 12900ks multi-core wise it's closer to the ryzen 5 7600 or the core i5 12600 KF of course those processors were in desktop computers and the M2 Pro is in a laptop and drawing far less power but for the interest of the benchmarks I'm just focusing on Raw performance right now running a compute Benchmark through metal API it gets 73 287 while running it through opencl gets a score of 43 209. now you may notice the tests on screen don't exactly match the numbers I'm saying that's just because I ran the test without screen recording in order to get the most accurate results and then I ran them again while recording in order to have something to show on screen these scores may not beat out all the other CPUs and gpus out there but as with all things it's a balance Apple's arm-based processor has a low power consumption and excellent efficiency leading to excellent battery life now there is one way the performance on the 2023 MacBook Pro is actually a drop from the last generation and that's the SSD they doubled the capacity of the nand modules which sounds like a good thing but because they didn't also upgrade the base storage to one terabyte the base 512 gigabyte model now has just two nand chips while the previous generation had four this leads to a decreased SSD speed from the M1 equivalent still these speeds are good all things considered Blackmagic disk Speed Test shows a read speed around 3 300 megabytes a second and a write speed of nearly 3 000 megabytes a second since the base model has 16 gigabytes of RAM unlike the MacBook Air which starts out with just eight you're far less likely to use Swap and therefore less likely to notice any real world changes as a result of the slower SSD now switching over to the blender Benchmark 3.4.0 which tests rendering and how fast the system can process samples testing the CPU cores on the M2 prochip led to a score of just 199.48 while running the test on the GPU it received 657.07 the CPU performance was really close to that of the M1 Max finally running cinebench R23 with a multi-core test the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 prochip received 11723 and in a single core test it got 1631 not reaching the scores of xeons and threadrippers but beating out the core i5 11600 KF and about on par with the ryzen 5 5600x again it's worth noting that it's competing against desktop class products here and the power draw is just over 30 Watts while some of these competing products are drawing well over 100 Watts by the way if you have any other benchmarks you'd be interested in let me know in the comments below and I'll see about adding it to our list for all future reviews all right so I've covered content consumption and some more professional workloads now but what about just general everyday use as I've said before the laptop carries over the design from the previous generation when the 2021 MacBook Pro came out it switched from a design focused wedge shape to a slightly more boxy shape that I think strikes a better balance of performance and style The Wider sides let Apple bring back some ports they'd previously removed in this new generation saw some improvements on the left side we've got the magsafe 3 connector for charging up two Thunderbolt ports and a headphone jack with support for high impedance headphones over on the right side of the machine there's a full-size SD card slot another Thunderbolt port and an HDMI 2.1 port as I touched on previously this upgrade to HDMI 2.1 brings higher resolutions and refresh rates supporting up to 8K 60hz or 4K 240 hertz while there are certainly other laptops that have more to offer in terms of ports this is the first time in more than five years that I've had a laptop with an HDMI port and an SD card slot built in and I am so glad to have them back it seems minor but it's one more adapter I'd have to keep track of I already carry around an adapter for cfast cards and CF Express cards so that's just one more thing I can leave at home one negative from The Identical design is the continued existence of a large Notch for the 1080p FaceTime camera the MacBook Pro still hasn't gained face ID or other features to help justify the large cutout but as I've said in some previous videos once you start really using the machine you basically forget it's there the menu bar helps to hide it in the slightly taller aspect ratio prevents content from being covered by it as far as the camera goes an average person definitely won't run into any issues with it if perfectly adequate for video meetings or FaceTime calls but a separate webcam or using your iPhone's camera through continuity camera will be a big step up in quality the microphone on the laptop however is pretty outstanding Apple refers to the three mic array as studio quality news's directional beam forming to get good clear audio from the user while blocking out other nearby sounds I've been really impressed with the microphone it really does have a studio type sound to it blocking out pretty much any of the room tone this is the onboard audio from the MacBook Pro's array of microphones go ahead and let me know what you think in the comments down below the keyboard continues what you'd expect from a MacBook keyboard there isn't too much travel distance and the mechanical keyboard certainly offers a more tactile experience but as with so many things there's a lot of personal choice in what makes a good keyboard I like the typing experience on the MacBook Pro and it's certainly much better than the butterfly keyboards Apple faced out a few years ago I also quite like the styling of the black background behind the keys rather than bare metal the touch ID built into the keyboard is also very handy to unlock the computer if for whatever reason I'm not wearing my Apple watch as I've mentioned throughout the review the efficiency with apple silicon is fantastic leading to excellent battery life the 16 inch version will last even longer but whether I was on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro any of the laptops last long enough on battery that I don't have to think about bringing a charger with me when I'm leaving the home I was gonna try to talk about gaming but there really isn't too much to talk about it isn't the power of the MacBook Pro holding it back but the operating system you can play Minecraft League of Legends and other games but there's just no way to see Max as gaming machines until more modern AAA games start supporting Mac OS if you want to play some retro games you can always emulate the system and older games could work if you're playing through a Windows Virtual Machine using software like parallels but Macs just don't compare to Windows machines or gaming consoles for the time being hopefully that will change while I've stayed pretty focused on the M2 MacBook Pro here of course it doesn't exist in a bubble the MacBook Air while less powerful and it has less connectivity is still a great laptop and it packs a great punch for its size and its base price is also 800 less expensive if you think that could be a good option for you check out my comparison video the last generation MacBook Pro could also be a great option especially if you're willing to go with a used laptop the M1 Pro or M1 Max micro Pro could be a fantastic value outperforming the more modern M2 MacBook Air in the same form factor as the current MacBook Pro the M2 Pro MacBook Pro is the right laptop for me I've enjoyed using it the past month and it will continue to be my laptop going forward I hope this video helped you out if it did consider leaving a like leave your thoughts in the comments down below and subscribe to the channel for more from nine to five Mac\n"