They aren't though. The fact that they are ridiculously comparing performance to the 3 year old at this point final Intel MacBook (which was a dog turd) in their press release with some very cherry picked benchmarks suggests things aren't quite as good as they could be. Why are they talking about 3+ old parts and not the current competition?
My bet for why they're comparing it to the Intel models: They want to advertise more heavily to the Intel folks so they can more quickly reduce / remove support for multiple architectures. They are trying to convince the Intel folks that Apple Silicon will be much more performant. Also, they probably want people to spend money on their products sooner than they otherwise would have.
That being said, They are still comparing against the M1 chips here. They aren't only comparing against Intel.
“With M2 Pro on MacBook Pro:
Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster5 than the previous generation.”
In other words, they're absolutely using the Intel machine to bury the lede.
Apple is now facing the same struggle as AMD and Intel. They have a generational processor product that relies on new silicon to get faster, and they can't get new silicon fast enough. The M2 was basically just a wattage-bump of the M1, and looking at the performance increase/processor count, I'm inclined to call the Pro/Max the same thing. You're telling me you added 2 cores to a 10 core system for a 20% performance increase? Wow, color me surprised.
The whole thing feels like Apple's lack of humility here is biting them in the ass. There's nothing wrong with paving your own path in the tech industry, but mocking your competitors is not what a reasonably-educated analyst does. It's what someone in marketing does.
Marketing essay (that I wrote with the help of the https://www.trustmypaper.com/ ) is a type of writing that requires careful consideration and a good understanding of the topic. Its structure is defined and follows a specific pattern. Various elements such as data, statistics, graphs and charts are also presented in the body of the essay. Using the information provided, the writer should develop a marketing strategy.
File it under the "botched marketing campaign" folder, then. If you're selling a machine to professionals, the copywriting ought to speak their language.
They are selling to professionals, but probably not ones that speak your exact language. Having a solid understanding of hardware puts you into a small small minority of professionals that this was meant to be for. This is the same for Intel and AMD marketing: hardcore tech people are not the target audience for this material.
If you know what "color grading" is (and your job depends on doing it) you're probably a "hardcore tech" person that knows what the mystical abbreviation "GPU" stands for.
Professional writers using a word processor might not understand what "hardware-accelerated H.264" means, yet there it is on their website under Air! Are those for "hardcore tech" people?
You're referencing marketing material. All marketing material is to sell the product, usually to a somewhat targeted subset of the buyers. Looking at their sales, and around any office, their marketing, and "Pro" products, appear to be extremely appealing to a large range of professional users. I think this shows that their "Pro" label is appropriate. I'm having trouble understanding why you think it isn't appropriate.
Do you have a notebook in mind that is worthy of a "Pro" label, so I can see what you're baseline is?
You defined a "Pro" as someone that's "using your computer to make money", like writers using a word processor. Let's suppose all they do is use Google Docs in a browser.
Should they buy the Air, or pay the premium for the Pro? After all, they're "hardcore tech" people.
Because then only people with Intel Macs care. People like me, who remember the 2019 i9 Macbook Pro being one of Apple's least-recommended laptops, are kinda unfazed by favorable performance comparisons. There are probably hundreds of laptops that can destroy it in a fraction of it's power envelope; it wasn't a great machine.
Mostly, it's ironic that Apple is comparing themselves to a company that they want so desperately to escape. And, once you do run the math on their actual year-over-year improvements, it's not that different from AMD or Intel. And Apple is increasing their power consumption to hit those numbers. It's quite literally square one in a sense, just with a different CPU architecture and a different manufacturer.
I just got an M1 Pro MBP for work last week, so I was kicking myself a little when I saw this. Then I was less disappointed when I saw the only difference is a 20% speed increase for some apps, no changes to things I would actually care about, like adding a couple USB-A ports, or if the speed increase was > 50%.
I do all compiling and heavy testing on servers, so the laptop is just for SSH, analysis software, and regular desktop stuff, for which it is fast enough.
You’ll have to wait until 3rd parties do those comparisons?
Apple has literally never posted “here’s a ream of benchmarks vs the Dell XPS XYZ and HP modelnumbersneeze738462” — pretending this is indicative of some grand conspiracy to hide performance deficiencies of these new M2 models the way GP is, is silly.
Realistically it’s expected it will perform relative to competitors now as the old models did in the past.
More realistically, this is one of the more drab ways apple announces products. They didn’t even have a presentation or anything. So they’re clearly not marketing with the same goals in mind as a presentation. I’d say the intended audience here are people already going to buy the latest model because they’re in the apple ecosystem.
Not that I’m inclined to defend a multi trillion dollar company, of course. It’s just pithy to hop into this sort of thread and grind the old axe against apple.
I am not sure if most people buying MBPs are interested in the synthetic benchmark performance as much as they are interested in energy efficiency and vertical integrations.
