Some customers were taken aback by a purported reduction in the media engine’s specifications when Apple first announced the new MacBook Pro earlier this week. The M2 Max’s spec sheet only stated one encode and decode engine, in contrast to the M1 Max’s constant listing of two. Since then, this page has been modified to reflect the machine’s current state.
Only the specifications page for the 14-inch MacBook Pro revealed that the M2 Max chip only has one ProRes Encode/Decode engine, contrary to Apple’s original press releases, which always stated that it had two.
Since then, the page’s media engine section has been updated with information on two video encoding and two ProRes encoding and decoding engines. Compared to any software- or CPU-based rendering of videos, this hardware-based encoding is significantly quicker and more effective. The additional encode engines may not make much of a difference to the typical user, but video editors who frequently work with many video files at once and professional codecs like ProRes and ProRes raw may notice the improvement. The M2 Max chip is likely to be a desirable upgrade for many when configuring PCs due to the explanation of this improvement over the M2 Pro.
Even while the exterior design of the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros is identical, the upgraded media engine is merely one of many improvements made to this generation of Apple laptops. For better multicore performance, the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips have additional CPU and GPU cores, and the MagSafe connections are color-matched to their respective devices, which is a good enhancement for those who value aesthetics.
