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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro M2

82owners with an opinion
70%of verdicts positive
46/21positive/negative since 2024
15 yrslongest happy owner
2happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and noise; criticized for ergonomics and software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 15 yearsStill going
I have used MacBooks as my main workstation for about 15 years and still do. My initial transition from Debian to OS X was painful. Once it settled in, it became comfortable. I like a lot of things about it. I'll keep my M2 Pro for as long as I can but my next laptop is likely to be an AMD Framework to run Debian.
Likes itOwned 3 years
I've had the same system (M2 64GB MacBook Pro) for three years. 2.5 years ago it could just about run LLaMA 1, and that model sucked. Today it can run Mistral Small 3.1, Gemma 3 27B, Llama 3.3 70B - same exact hardware, but those models are competitive with the best available cloud-hosted model from two years ago (GPT-4). The best hosted models (o3, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5 etc) are still way better than the best models I can run on my 3-year-old laptop, but the rate of improvements for those local models (on the same system) has been truly incredible.
Likes itOwned 2.5 years
> still think it’s noteworthy that a model running on my 2.5 year old laptop (a 64GB MacBook Pro M2) is able to produce code like this—especially code that worked first time with no further edits needed. I believe we are vastly underestimating what our existing hardware is capable of in this space. I worry that narratives like the bitter lesson and the efficient compute frontier are pushing a lot of brilliant minds away from investigating revolutionary approaches. It is obvious that the current models are deeply inefficient when you consider how much you can decimate the precision of the weights post-training and still have pelicans on bicycles, etc.
Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going
Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly. I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!
Likes itOwned 1 year
Moderate to heavy use. Not 100% heavy use. The official specs claim 15-18 hours battery life. Practically, I'd say I do about 8 hours a day and the Mac lasts a couple of days before the battery goes to single-digit percentages. With lighter use, I see nearly a week of battery life. [Mine is an M2 16-inch MBP from last year, perhaps the M3's are somewhat better?] In comparison, my new Dell work laptop with an Intel chip gives me about 4 hours. It's not an apples apples comparison but they're in the ballpark.
Doesn’t like it
It hurts _all the time_ for me. I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC. I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time. Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor. This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address. Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac. Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux. Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, w…
Likes it
I use both macOS and Linux (NixOS + gnome/niri) regularly. When everything is working properly--and, to be clear, I'm talking about the macOS side--I see almost no difference between the two operating systems. I'm on a ThinkPad on one side and an M2 Macbook Pro on the other. The only meaningful difference not attributable to something like different screen size is that Apple displays are damn good, and their speakers are otherworldly. I was running Asahi/NixOS on a Macbook Air for a long time, and that experience was also top notch--only battery life was a few percentage points worse on NixOS--but the aarch64 software situation and emulation experience were just not there. I expect they've improved a bit since. If someone would make a quality laptop that doesn't look like a Honda street racer and has excellent audio, I'd be very happy.
Likes it
My M2 Pro rarely spins up the fan. Usually when it does, it takes me a while to notice. When I do, sometimes I need to stay quiet for a second to even locate where the low purr comes from. Then I usually smile a little and think “hey, the fan is on!” and forget about it again. In fairness, my Franework 13 Pro is the same, only it gets less hot than the MacBook.
Doesn’t like it
I find my M2 Macbook Pro so much less pleasant to use than my x220 thinkpad (running Debian) that I only use the Macbook for CPU-bound activities to which the x220 thinkpad is unequal. I find the Apple offering's keyboard worse to type on, its enormous touchpad is a chore to engage with compared to the venerable Trackpoint, and the operating system feels contrived to make simple things difficult. The x220 thinkpad is 14 years old now. And has a 500 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. Perhaps in another 14 years Apple will be able to match it feature for feature. One might well ask why I own Apple hardware at all. The answer is to buy entry into their walled garden as a developer.
Likes it
We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips
Neutral
> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
Doesn’t like it
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a retail partner soon, though. Surely they must realize that Micro Center would be an ideal partner for their demographic. I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”. There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had. I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GB in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it. My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. I’m one of the lucky people who snagged an old stock 32GB module for $250 during the announcement keynote. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary. It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about…
Likes it
I mean, that was obvious from the word "go". Even Zuckerberg isn't as deluded to think that there's money in constantly releasing closed models and hypserscaling their deployment, which is why we got muse-glimmer 30b last week. I have been playing with it on a 32gb MBP w/ M2 Pro. If prosumer-grade hardware from almost three years ago can now offer a novice a way to host a possibly serviceable software development agent, then there's little incentive to pay out for LLMs like Anthropic's or OpenAI's over the long run.
Likes it
Yep - it's a game changer on the Pendolino trains I get to work as they tilt going around corners. Most people seem to be fine, but for me, it was impossible to get some work done on my commute until vehicle motion cues were a thing and I got > M2 MBP for work.
Neutral
Tried it out for a few mins and it does what advertised. I think Electron is perfectly fine for what this app does: Managing ECS. It's not an all-in-one platform the same way VSCode is, so bloating isn't really an issue. On my M2 MacBook pro 64GB, it's sitting at 30.5 Mb of memory usage. JetBrains' toolbox app (Written using Java) is sitting at 505.1Mb and this app arguably does more than that one, if not an equal amount. The wallpaper process is taking up 29.9Mb of memory, so this app amounts to just another wallpaper worth of memory which is nothing. However, for any app that aims to be an "all-in-one" desktop GUI replacement for the aws console, which may need extensions, a native framework would be the way to go over electron. One piece of feedback I have is to just have a selection menu for models from providers rather than asking the user to input text, as well as an option for effort level if available.
Doesn’t like it
Out of interest, what machine and model are you running it on? I tried the qwen3.6-27b Q6_k GUFF in llama.cpp and LM Studio on my M2 MacBook Pro 32GB machine last week, and I barely get a token a second with either. What sort of speed should I be expecting? I tried some of the Llama 3 34b (nous-capybara?) models two years ago with llama.cpp, and I seem to remember getting a few tokens a second then, so not sure if I've got something completely mis-configured, or I just have unreasonable expectations. Or maybe qwen 3.x is slower for some reason? (Is it mixture of experts?) I'm not expecting it to be instant, but what I'm currently seeing is not really usable.
Doesn’t like it
I tried the qwen3.6-27b Q6_k GUFF in llama.cpp and LM Studio on my M2 MacBook Pro 32GB machine last week, and I barely get a token a second with either. The fact that it was this slow makes me suspect it's a matter of insufficient free RAM. The entire model needs to fit into RAM (and stay there the entire time) for acceptable performance. (not sure of exact diagnosis/fix, but definitely look in that direction if you're still having this issue when you give it another shot) Also, there are two stages - prompt processing, and token generation. Prompt processing is notoriously slow on Apple Silicon unfortunately. If you have large context (which includes system prompts, lots of tools loaded by a harness like Claude Code, OpenCode, etc) it can take minutes for prompt processing before you see the first output token. On the bright side, the tokens are cached between turns, so subsequent turns won't be so bad.
Likes it
The lack of native games on Apple Silicon is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against computing. I got Fallout 3 working on my M2 MBP as well as it did on Windows back in the day. Temps were cool, battery was decent. If they sold my college years gaming collection (15-ish years ago) in a way that ran natively through GoG or Steam, I'd buy every single title .
Doesn’t like it
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore. I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out. Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow. Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover. My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation. I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip. And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
Likes it
>Because realistically in the laptop computer space Apple is obliterating everything else right now. Probably right, seeing how bad the laptop world is nowadays. Even with its shitty chiclet keyboard and button-less trackpad, the M2 Pro I have to use at work trounces the XPSes my Windows colleagues have. Still far from the Latitude e64x0 and old 6x series Thinkpads I had but well, they only win on the haptics and repairability level. Thankfully I kept an e6440 that still works "okay" with its Haswell i5 and 1080p IPS screen; the thermals and crappy Intel iGPU are the only thing I really lament.
Doesn’t like it
> Particularly Apple who are complete asshats about making repair very expensive if something like a screen breaks or a battery needs replacement It is even worse, you can have completely working laptop, but because it is locked via login of previous user, well it is ewaste now. Especially the ones with Mx chips are not even being stolen anymore and buying them on eBay is playing a lottery with people who don't know how to log off from their Apple accounts. Or even better when Apple won't let you log off - happened to me on M2 MacBook Pro, I have tried to log off dozens of times and it kept me logged in the Apple account. One use laptop.
Doesn’t like it
Exactly! "It just works" used to be true for macos, and linux was for tinkering. Now, ubuntu "just works" (and fast!). It's not just that macos is slow and window management is strange. Last time I had a macbook (M2 pro) I needed 3rd party software just to use a 4k external monitor without blurring.
Likes it
Great timing too to ditch MacOS. Just instilled Fedora Asahi Remix 43 on may MacBook Pro M2, and both KDE and Gnome work great. So happy to be liberated form the increasingly sloppy Apple OS. https://asahilinux.org/fedora/