Among everything announced at Apple’s WWDC 2022 was the company’s new M2 chip and the first two laptops to host it, the all-new MacBook Air …
Among everything announced at Apple’s WWDC 2022 was the company’s new M2 chip and the first two laptops to host it, the all-new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. While the Air received a lot of attention in the keynote, the MacBook Pro update received more of a cursory mention, with talk of its ProRes encoding and decoding capabilities and little else. Aside from the switch to the M2 chip, it appeared that little, if anything else had changed. Once the Apple Store came back online following the keynote, the changes — or lack thereof — were confirmed. What was stranger: the new MacBook Air appeared to be more «pro» than the actual 13-inch MacBook Pro. I hunted through the specs looking for possible advantages for people to consider the littlest Pro instead of the M2-based Air and came up short. With the exception of its processing, the 13-inch Pro is now out of step with 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Why keep it around? After talking with my colleagues on CNET’s computers team, Lori Grunin, Joseph Kaminski and Dan Ackerman (who got hands-on with the new Air), here are the five reasons we came up with as to why Apple is keeping the 13-inch MacBook Pro around and why someone might choose it over the updated MacBook Air. Introduced in 2016, the Touch Bar is a programmable OLED display replacing the function key row on MacBook Pros.
