Apple’s new MacBook Pro’s have been unleashed. Is now the right time to buy, or should you hold off for next year?
This year marks a special occasion. For the first time since the MacBook Pro’s introduction in 2006, it’s hard to find a major fault with Apple’s new pro line of MacBooks: from their high-refresh ProMotion displays, to their 20+ hour battery life (thanks to software optimization with custom SoCs) and the resurrection of MagSafe charging. But is this the best time to purchase a new MacBook Pro, or will next year’s computers bring another quantum leap in performance making this year’s feel outdated in comparison?
In the past, yearly MacBook refreshes meant marginal increases in processing power. Intel’s line of x86 processors offered little in the way of year-over-year performance gains, especially when it was thermally constrained in the thin chassis of last-generation’s MacBook Pro.
Now Apple’s new MacBooks have ditched the x86 CPU architecture of yore in favor of their mobile-line of A processors’ ARM technology. Simply put, Apple is bringing refreshing changes to an otherwise plain and predictable yearly upgrade cycle.
And therein lies the problem. Next year’s MacBook Pro’s could be even better if Apple’s iPhone lineup is any indication. Usually we see a year-over-year performance increase of up to 50% between iPhone refreshes, and there’s no reason to believe these sort of performance and efficiency gains won’t make its way to the Mac now that it’s using a similar processor to the iPhone.
Is now a good time to upgrade? I suppose that depends on the programs you use and your day-to-day needs, but for most everyone I think the answer is yes, so long as you have the cash. It doesn’t matter how much faster next year’s MacBooks will be, regardless of new developments with ARM’s architecture or whether there will only be marginal increases to what is already a beast of a machine. With how speedy the M1 processor has performed since launch, these new MacBook Pros will probably be quick and snappy by any standard, even when next year’s Apple’s M2 Pro/Max chips are inevitably released.