Last night, Apple announced the new MacBook Pro lineup powered by its new M2 Pro and M2 Max Apple Silicon chips. The company also launched a refreshed Mac mini with M2 and M2 Pro options for compact enthusiasts, with support for up to two external displays on the former and three on the latter.
The new lineup starts with the base model with an M2 chip with an eight-core CPU, 10-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine. It has 8GB of unified memory and 256GB of SSD storage, which can be configured up to 24GB and 2TB respectively. As for ports, the M2 Mac mini comes with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and Gigabit Ethernet that can be upgraded to 10 Gigabit for an extra RM400.
The premium offering here is of course the model with the new M2 Pro chip, with two variations depending on how much power you need for your workload. The base configuration comes with a 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. The more beefed-up M2 Pro SoC is equipped with a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU if you’re willing to pay an additional RM1,200.
The base M2 Pro model starts with 16GB of unified memory but can be configured to 32GB. Storage-wise, it has 512GB of SSD storage that can go up a whopping 8TB. The higher-end model also gets slightly more I/O with four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a headphone jack, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and a Gigabit Ethernet port that can also be fitted with 10 Gigabit Ethernet for a little extra.
Excitingly, Apple has actually cut the cost of the base Mac mini from its previous starting price of RM2,999 to a significantly cheaper RM2,499 price tag with the M2 chipset. The vanilla M2 Mac can go up to RM7,699 when maxed out with 24GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
On the other hand, the Mac mini with the new M2 Pro starts from RM5,599 and tops out at RM18,399 when fitted with all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Apple lists the new Mac mini lineup as “currently unavailable” for now, with no actual release date announced yet for Malaysia.
