M1 Pro vs. M2: A Guide

I was never a fan of Apple hardware — even though I’d worked on company-provided Macs for 15 years — until the Apple Silicon era. I was so impressed by the speed of an M1 Mac Mini I bought out of curiosity, that I had the company get me a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro as soon as we got our dev environment to support it.

The M1 Pro version of the MacBook comes with is even faster than the plain M1, and I have been very happy with the laptop, with the only disadvantage being its weight. At 2.1kg it’s not “olden days heavy,” but I move around with it all the time, and I can definitely feel the weight compared to the 1-1.5kg Ultrabooks I’ve used. It’s the size that makes the weight more obvious, requiring significant torque when lifting it with one hand. 

The M1/M2 MacBook Airs do feel so much nicer to carry around, plus they are fanless designs, which adds to the appeal. However, I personally find the 13-inch screen too small for my main laptop, given that I often use it away from my monitors.

Then, Apple released a 15.3-inch version of the MacBook Air. While you lose some ports and RAM — I’m on 32 GB, while the Air maxes out at 24 GB — you don’t have any annoying fans that may become an issue as laptops age and a weight of just 1.5kg. Not a bad trade so far, but, the crucial question for me is: do you win or lose with the (next-gen, but non-Pro) CPU, if you are coming from an M1 Pro Mac?

M1 Pro vs. M2 CPU Comparison

Luckily, I have an M2 Mac Mini that I use as my media/Plex server, which has the same CPU as the 15-inch MacBook Air, so I can run some benchmarks to answer the question myself. You’d want at least the 512GB SSD version to get the full disk speed of the M2, which is slower than the M1 Pro anyway. As it still manages a respectable 1500MB/s, I personally found it more cost effective to go for the 256GB internal and add a larger external SSD.

Let’s see the CPU spec comparison:

The theory says that the M2 is a smaller chip with fewer (just four performance versus eight), but faster CPU cores. The GPU cores are fewer on the M2, but they have more execution units. The big difference is the memory bandwidth: the M1 Pro has a 256-bit bus, which is twice the width, thus bandwidth, of the M2.

We can see the theory translate directly to the following synthetic benchmarks results:

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M1 Pro vs. M2 Synthetic Benchmarks

Geekbench 5

According to Geekbench, the M2 is roughly 10 percent faster for single-core performance, while it is almost 30 percent slower for multi-core, which is pretty much as expected. We'll see how that translates to some real-world tasks later on. I should note here that the MacBook Airs do constrain the M2 a bit in prolonged multi-core performance, but according to widely reported benchmarking, it seems to be a difference of under 5 percent compared to the Mac Mini.

M1 Pro vs. M2 Game Performance

To compare the GPUs, I'll use the in-game benchmark of Civilization VI, the base benchmark and Gathering Storm expansion for graphics and AI, as it’s the one game that I play from time to time:

Interestingly, I get pretty much the same AI benchmark result and the M2 marginally pulling ahead (2 percent faster) with the fewer but faster GPU cores on the graphics benchmarks.

M1 Pro vs. M2: Benchmarking Real World Tasks

Xcode

I’ll continue with some benchmarks for developers. I clean-compiled my astronomy and weather iOS apps 10 times each and took the average:

Xcode scales very well on multi-core systems, so M2 is 15 percent slower than the M1 Pro with its more cores (and faster RAM). I actually got the same advantage for the M1 Pro when I timed how long it took to actually decompress the Xcode .xip, which, as you probably know, is quite a slow task in general:

time xip -x Xcode_14.3.xip

Not a huge difference, but I would not call it insignificant either.

Compiling Perl & Python From Sources

Apart from Xcode, I often get to compile with Make, GCC/Clang, etc. I’ll try to compile Perl 5.36.0, because I use Perl at work and Python 3.10.12 from sources.

First, following the common instructions, (which give you a single-core compile and tests). For Perl we can just use perlbrew:

time perlbrew install perl-5.36.0

For Python we run manually:

time (./configure && make && make test)

The M2 manages to be 7-to-8 percent faster. Let’s try a fast compilation on all cores, skipping tests:

time perlbrew install -n -j <n> perl-5.36.0

And:

time make -j <n>

Where n = 10 for the M1 Pro, 8 for the M2.

The results:

The M2 is 7-11 percent faster. This is due to the fact that from the activity monitor it is clear that despite the -j specifying all cores, the compilations don't actually significantly engage most of the cores, so the M1 Pro’s extra ones don’t help.

Handbrake

To see where the M1 Pro’s extra cores do help, I left a 4k video transcoding for last:

The full 30 percent M1 Pro advantage we saw with Geekbench is present here.

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M1 Pro vs. M2: Which Is Better?

Let's put all tests in a nice table:

My takeaway is that if you are doing specific, heavy, multi-core tasks like video encoding, you will see a significant slowdown going from the previous-gen MacBook Pro to the new MacBook Air. I guess even with less obvious tasks like Xcode, you can still sort of feel the difference.

So it’s specific types of users who would add one more drawback to not having a “Pro” version. And I think these types of users would consider going to an M2 Pro Mac instead, if they were to upgrade from their M1 Pro.

If you belong to the other types of users who are mainly on lighter (less thread heavy) tasks, the M2 is actually a bit of an upgrade over the M1 Pro. And the 15-inch MacBook Air makes a great proposition: small, light, no fans, very fast.

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