MacBook Pro 14 M2: What Real Users Say After Years of Use

This product is not meant to be purchased. It's a marketing tactic. Apple's marketing funnel has done this for years. This product serves you to buy the more expensive MacBook Pro. It always has. It's the stopgap between the 15" Air and the real 14" MacBook Pro.

I was curious and looked up how much RAM the 1st generation late-2012 Retina MBP had. It shipped with 8GB... the same 11 years later. Apple has offered a lower tier 'Pro' model for a while now but they've basically increased the price by $300 from $1299 for the MBP 13 M2 Touchbar model to this one at $1599.

I wasn't expecting Apple to almost double power consumption just for a 7%-11% gain in single thread performance. It's still far ahead of the competition in that area but it's wild how their efficiency regresses by just being pushed a couple hundred MHz higher.

Not for 5k. No way. Give this a year or two and you'll see these refurbed. New battery. For much cheaper.

That 2012 Mac allowed you to upgrade the RAM. Now we've been multiple years with soldered RAM — the most recent Apple machine I own which can upgrade RAM is the Intel 2018 Mac Mini — Apple is clearly trying to upsell their users into getting the 16GB model.

I still hate non-upgradeable RAM and SSD.

Get an M1/M2 Max now, they're still great. Or even an M* Pro, since the Max is only really beneficial in specific workflows.

The biggest problem is the price gouging on the ram upgrades. 8gb of ram on the base M3 macbook is an insult in 2023, and apple charges an additional 200$ per 8gb.

Remember when AS came out and techtubers were making it out like Apple Silicon's unified RAM was some sort of witchcraft that made RAM sizes irrelevant? BS from the start, clearly.

M3 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM is likely an excellent choice for casual dev work. I have the M1 Pro 32GB RAM and honestly it's overkill. The 32GB were for future proofing, I don't need that much in normal use.

Shame that the display receives no improvement. Those response time numbers are too slow for 60 Hz let alone 120 Hz so extra motion blur is still a problem.

I mainly posted this because my old laptop the Intel 2019 16 inch base model didn't really hold up as well since it would overheat and was being phased out sooner than the Apple Silicon models.

I never edit videos on mine, love this laptop.

The 14" Pro is probably an ideal software dev laptop from a cost optimization standpoint. Ridiculously good screen, which you'll be staring at a lot. High res, while not overly small. It has all the hardware accelerators you'd want to play with as a dev, and a reasonably beefy GPU.

I love my 14" Pro but I also wish something even slightly comparable existed with Windows, just want a fast, cool, quiet laptop with 10+ hour battery life and mini LED or OLED screen.

The retail price for a 64 gigabit (8GB) LPDDR5 Micron or Samsung chip from Mouser is just $50. Apple doesn't pay anywhere near that price. I'd be surprised they're paying more than $15. This is not a cost consideration. It's just market segmentation to encourage upsells.

As a dev I recommend 512gb/16gb at least. Refurb M1 Pro is really good value right now.

I got two of these for the fam (one silver, one space grey — both look great), definitely a great machine. Battery life is a huge deal.

The Apple Silicon-era of MacBooks are amazing fr.

It's far too expensive for the modest improvements from the M2. $1600 and you still are stuck with 8GB, 1 external display, limited I/O, and again modest performance improvements. You'd be better off buying an M2 Air and saving $600 now, or an M2 Pro for like $1200.

The next fastest machine, the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 OLED, is 21% slower but only costs 48% the price of the Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 Max. You can pay half the price for most of the speed with the competition. The MacBook certainly is the fastest, but it's an absolute terrible value.

It strongly depends on what you're developing. 16GB is just barely enough to run a couple Chrome tabs and IntelliJ on a medium-sized project. My workflows with VMs won't even work on less than 32GB at all and still heavily run into swap usage then.

Apart from the mediocre gains from the M1 to the M2, especially in efficiency, what kills it for me is the lack of support for AV1. It's gonna feel outdated and downright obsolete way sooner than it has a right to.

I have the Base M1 MacBook Pro 14" and I see absolutely no need to upgrade it. It only has 36 cycle count and 98% max capacity.

You have more general purpose CPU power so you'll be able to spend less time compiling your code and more time writing and testing it. You have a more powerful neural engine which is always a plus for ML. You have a larger, higher resolution, brighter, higher refresh rate built in display; more IO; better keyboard; better webcam; better cooling; bigger battery; bigger trackpad; more powerful GPU capable of outputting to more, higher resolution external displays.

Probably the perfect laptop.

I do Lightroom and Capture One editing on my MBP M2 Pro with 16GB RAM — it flies, no issues or freezes.

Got this same computer right after launch and using it has been butter. I'm a teacher so nothing too heavy but I have completed a few hour+ video projects on this thing and it never breaks a sweat. I don't even think I've heard the fans come on. Excellent device.

It's faster, has a way better battery and doesn't get hot even when running multiple large apps at once, like Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc. Apple's M series chip is way ahead of Intel.

It's perfect for anything, I'd say. Using the base M2 Pro MBP for 3 months now. No intense tasks whatsoever.

These new silicon MacBook Pros 14 and 16 starting with the M1 Pro chip have been the best (non gaming) pieces of kit ever made.

It's the best laptop I've ever used. Truly impressive machine.

Just this month I got the same computer. Love it. Especially love the 6 speaker hi-fi sound. Came from a 2014 MBP 13". The M2 Pro chip is so much better than the old Intel chip in prior Mac.

I've had the 14" M1 Pro 10-core 32GB RAM config in space grey since January, and it's definitely on track to be the best laptop I've ever owned.

No offense but you probably would've been fine with an M1 with 16GB. Sure it was the best 2.5K you spent, but you didn't have to spend 2.5K.

I've had it for a month (upgraded from a 2013 MBP 16gb RAM) and so far it has been delightful. I mostly do Software Engineering in this computer and I can tell you that its speed to process and compile code is truly amazing. Doesn't overheat at all even when I have IntelliJ, discord, and multiple tabs open on my browser.

I just got a refurbished M2 Pro 14 the other day from BestBuy. I also do some video editing and music production and this is the best computer I've ever owned for that! The battery life is incredible.

My M1 Pro 14 inch base model turning 3 years next month, operates as new. Not sure if I will upgrade end of the year to M5 Pro or wait until M6 Pro — ironically Apple made these devices 2 good.

I've had the 14 inch base model for 2+ years and it's still stupid quick. Often find it quicker than my M4 iPad Pro.

Since Apple released the Apple Silicon SOCs, they don't have even close competition in the market, even after 5 years. Nowadays STILL for 99% of the people (no matter what you do that is not gaming) is better to get a Mac.

Got this given to me from work and was very happy. I know this won't be a problem for a lot of people, but I was upset that I could not use a third external monitor which I could do on my old Mac. I had to spend like $70 on a HDMI to USB cable adapter with DisplayLink so I could use a third monitor again.

If you are working in AI you must have an Nvidia GPU — it's night and day. Windows is the only option in my opinion. In the Apple world, if you don't buy a MacBook Air it's too much money. Unless you are actually dependent on video editing or audio editing, which these devices are very good at.