But, that’s really not what this chip is for. The M2 Max laughs in the face of titanic productivity workloads.

When the time comes to top up, the 140-watt MagSafe charger will get you back to 100 percent in under 90 minutes. But crucially, during intensive work, it handily beats rivals that typically hit a maximum of two hours by an extra hour or two. The M2 Max model doesn’t reach the listed 15 hours of wireless web browsing that Apple claims it settled closer to 12 hours. It draws less power than rivals, ultimately achieving better battery life across the board-from productivity to intense creative workloads-as well as producing far less noise and heat. I've tested a lot of laptops in my time, and few have induced an audible “wow” as frequently as the MacBook Pro does. But it comes close and occasionally surpasses the competition in real-world tasks-and, I must emphasize, even on battery. At these fully kitted-out levels, it still can’t quite reach the heights of the best laptop processors and graphics cards for raw performance. This will cost you an eye-watering $4,299 (£4,549), and you can still spend more to upgrade it to 96 GB of unified memory and a 4- or 8-TB SSD. My test unit configuration is the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max-the 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU version-with 64 GB of unified memory and a 2-terabyte SSD. With a smaller, more efficient chip, it should bring a more sizable boost in both performance and battery life, but that doesn't mean the improvements in the second-gen chipsets aren't impressive.

What this change doesn’t represent is a move from a 5-nanometer process to 3 nm for the silicon-this is expected to happen with the M3 Pro and M3 Max next year. The M2 Max sees Apple’s top laptop chip move up from a 10-core CPU and a 32-core GPU on the M1 Max to 12-cores and 38-cores, respectively.

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