How do the various Apple M chips compare against one another with creative workloads, general computing, gaming, and battery life?
With the release of the new MacBook Pro 13-inch with Apple M2, everyone wants to know how the new Apple silicon stacks up against its predecessors, from the M1 to the M1 Ultra. So far, we only know of two products that will feature the new Apple M2: the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2) (opens in new tab) and the Apple MacBook Air (M2), though it’s likely that the M2 will be in the Apple Mac Mini (2022) as well as a new Apple iMac (24-inch, M2). So naturally, we want to see the Apple M1 vs M2 matchup, but given the new MacBook Pro might be tempting for some users, we also want to see how things match stack up against the M1 Pro and M1 Max, and whether it’s worth opting for one of those MacBook Pro models or if you ought to go with the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch with M2 now that it is available. And, while we’re here, how do the M1 Max and M1 Ultra stack up against each other for creative desktop applications in the Mac Studio? Well, we’ve run a bunch of numbers over the last few months on the best MacBook and Macs, and now we’re putting all of Apple’s latest chips into the arena to see how they all stack up for various workloads, from general performance to battery life to gaming, to help you figure out which Apple chip is the one you need to power your next Mac. There are a few things to note about the Apple M2, but first, out the gate is its single-core performance. A few weeks ago, we saw the first benchmarks pop up online showing that the M2’s Single-Core performance is comparable to the Intel Alder Lake i9-12900K, which is arguably the best processor in the desktop market. Now that we’ve done our own tests, we can confirm that this is absolutely the case. On average, the Apple M2 Geekbench 5 Single-Core score comes in around 1,932, which beats every other M-series chip as well as every other consumer processor except for the Intel Core i9-12900K and i9-12900HK, which is a variant of the K-series.
