Apple MacBook Pro 16 M2 Max (2023)

All hail the newly-crowned king of 16-inch laptops. Gareth Bevan takes the latest MacBook for a test drive

Price: £3,499-£3,749/$3,299-$3,499
Website: www.apple.com

Larger laptops, with their increased screen size, often make the best photo-editing and video-editing laptops. For the past few years, Apple's top entry in this category has been the MacBook Pro 16 and now it's back, having had a refresh with an all-new and all-powerful chip.

Apple has designed what it calls the most powerful chip yet in its just over two-year-old endeavours into making its own in-house processors and, on paper, the M2 Max is a beast. Able to be configured up to an absolutely monstrous 38-core GPU, 96GB of unified memory and 400GB/s memory bandwidth, Apple claims that the new 16-inch M2 Max can be up to 2.5x faster in photo editing in Adobe Photoshop and 6.5x faster in video editing in Final Cut Pro than the previous Intel i9 model with a Radeon Pro 5600M graphics card from AMD.

We ran a series of benchmarking tests on the new MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Max. It has slight gains on the M2 Pro in the CPU tasks, which will offer slightly faster speeds over the cheaper chip on normal processing tasks, although you can see huge gains when it comes to graphical processing power.

We performed our usual content creator tests, exporting a batch of 200 edited RAW files to JPEG in Adobe Lightroom, exporting a ten-minute 4K video in Apple ProRes using iMovie, and opening ten RAW files at once in Adobe Photoshop. The M2 Max performed all of these with unbelievable ease. On my Intel i7 MacBook, exporting photos or videos usually dominates the processing power so much that you can do nothing else except walk away until it is finished. However, on the MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Max, I could carry on working as if it wasn’t even exporting files.