Apple has unveiled more products in the last month than it has in most recent years combined, with an expanded MacBook Pro line being revealed headlined by MacBook Pro With PROLED XDR Display, but it also updated the tried and tested MacBook Pro model with the new M6 chip.
This is the exact same design with that still fantastic Liquid Retina XDR 120hz ProMotion Display with 1,600 nits of peak brightness, that 12MP centre stage camera, the six-speaker sound system as well as the same ports that go along with its fantastic 24 hours of battery life, but there’s some serious internal improvements that will see the MacBook Pro stay ahead of the competition at a time when RTX Spark has entered the chat bringing forward a big advancement for Windows laptops.
Apple’s new N1 chip brings forward Wi-Fi 7 which will help with internet speeds and Bluetooth 6 which is better for latency, and the memory bandwidth has also been increased to 170GB/s as well, but it’s the M6 Chip that is the big story here, and not that the M5 wasn’t already fast enough (and the M4 before it), but Apple is obviously not set on resting at this point.
The M6 chip has some solid improvements. As far as the cores go, it’s up to a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU as well and there’s a new Dual 16-Core Neural Engine alongside Neural Accelerators in each GPU core which is obviously great for accelerating AI workloads locally which is all the rage at this point.
I’ve been maining an M4 Max MacBook Pro for the last few years, and the base M6 MacBook Pro now outperforms the M4 Max when it comes to single-core performance which is a huge boon, and obviously it’s still a bit behind when it comes to multi-core performance but not by much and obviously you’re saving quite a bit of money price-wise too.
When it comes to performing local AI tasks, or photo editing, video editing or multitasking, the base M6 is going to be more than enough for most people, and it’s impressive that Apple is getting this much juice out of its laptops, and coupled with that all-day 24 hour battery life, it’s truly still a workhorse, that whilst no longer the top of the line MacBook Pro is still absolutely fantastic.
Whilst gaming support has slowed down a little, Cyberpunk 2077 ran perfectly at 30-60 FPS depending on how much you wanted to push it, and I spent a few hours playing Lies of P as well, which ran flawlessly, so I do still hope that we get wider AAA games support as the Apple Silicon chips are more than capable now.
The big question when purchasing a MacBook Pro now is whether you want to spring for the standard MacBook Pro or the one with the Tandem OLED display that has a touch screen and also is a lot lighter. There’s a big difference at $4,599 for that model versus $3,199 for the M6 MacBook Pro, but if it’s going to be something that you’re using for multiple years for your entire workload, that better display coupled with the higher performance and lighter overall laptop might be worth it, but otherwise the M6 MacBook Pro is still leaps and bounds ahead of what else is on the market on the other side of the fence.