New MacBook Pro has a notch! Apple claims M1 Pro, M1 Max chips are among fastest

The new MacBook Pro models have a display notch! And then bring back the legendary MagSafe charging connector! With the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips on board, Apple claims it has created one of the fastest professional laptops in the world right now. Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook pro will launch in India, starting at a price of ₹1,94,900.

The base MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip starts at ₹1,94,900 and you can configure it with the more powerful M1 Max chip. The 16-inch MacBook Pro also gets the choice of two chips, starting at ₹2,39,900. These laptops will go on sale form October 26 in India and come in only a single colour variant.

2021 MacBook Pro new features

Apple has redesigned these new MacBook Pro models when compared to the older models. The new MacBook Pro now comes in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes -- thanks to a display notch. It uses the same Liquid Retina XDR display with mini-LED technology from the M1 iPad Pro with 1000 nits of sustained brightness and 1600 nits of peak brightness. They also get the 120Hz ProMotion feature. The notch holds a 1080p FaceTime camera.

Apple brings back more ports to the MacBook Pro, starting with an HDMI port, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SDXC card slot, a high impedance headphone jack, and a new MagSafe port that also support fast charging – 0-50 percent in 30 minutes. There’s Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 for wireless connections.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro gets a four speaker audio system with two dedicated woofers while the 16-inch model gets a six-speaker system with two additional woofers. This brings the Spatial Audio feature to the MacBook Pro.

The main highlight, however, are the new chips. Both models can be configured with M1 Pro and M1 Max system-on-chips. The M1 Pro has a 10-core CPU and a 16-core GPU, whereas the M1 Max has a 32-core GPU. There’s also a 16-core neural engine for faster machine learning tasks. Apple claims the performance is on par with the mots powerful PC chips for notebook in the market, with better power efficiency.

Apple claims better battery life than before, with 17-hours of video playback time on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and 21 hours of video playback on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.