Enlarge / Apple's Vision Pro headset. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's Vision Pro went up for preorder this morning at 8 am ET. As expected, shipment dates for preorders quickly backed up to March as initial supply was accounted for. Regardless of whether you're in for the start or taking a wait-and-see approach with Apple's ultra-pricey new device, though, we have access to a little more information about the device than we did before thanks to updates to the Apple Store website.

The product page for Vision Pro reveals configurations and pricing, and a new specs page clarifies answers to some questions we've had for a while now.

You'll find all the relevant new information below. We've also updated our " What to expect from Apple Vision Pro " roundup with new information from the specs page.

Enlarge / A 14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's M3 Pro inside. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Apple announced the first three chips in its M3 processor family, the M3 Pro immediately stood out. Not because it was a huge leap over the prior generation, but because it was the first time we had seen Apple reduce key specs like transistor count, CPU and GPU core count, and memory bandwidth from one generation to the next.

Transistor count is an imperfect proxy for performance, but adding transistors is one of the primary ways to improve a chip's performance (ramping clock speeds up is another, which we'll revisit shortly). Both the M3 and M3 Max feature substantial transistor count boosts compared to their M2 counterparts—from 20 billion to 25 billion for the M3, and from 67 billion to 92 billion with the M3 Max. The M3 Pro has 37 billion, down from 40 billion in the M2 Pro.

That didn't tell us much by itself, but it did set us up to expect an M3 Pro that was a modest-at-best improvement over the M2 Pro. Now that we've been able to test one in a 14-inch MacBook Pro, we can confirm that this is the case. The M3 Pro is still decidedly faster than the regular M3, and building a chip with fewer transistors on a newer 3 nm manufacturing process has other benefits. But there's a wider performance gap between the M3 Pro and M3 Max than there was in the M2 generation, and you'll need to wait for the M4 generation before you see substantially faster Pro chips.

Enlarge / The 2022 iPad Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Over the past few days, there have been many conflicting rumors and reports, some from usually reliable sources, about Apple's plans for the next wave of iPad updates. But on close examination, the rumors may not be as contradictory as it seems.

First up was an email blast from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman on Sunday. Noting that he had written in July that we would see iPad refreshes before the end of the year, he appeared to walk that back, writing, "a new entry-level iPad, iPad Air and iPad mini are all in development with faster chips, but I don’t believe updates of any significance are imminent."

He pointed to his prior reporting that Apple plans a major iPad Pro update with an OLED screen next year, but not before 2023's end.

Enlarge / Apple's 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's a credit to Apple's chips that when I'm using my 13-inch MacBook Air, I feel much more constrained by the screen size than I do by the performance.

That wasn't always the case. The Intel MacBook Airs of years past were perfectly fine for basic computing, but you could feel the difference between an Air and an iMac or MacBook Pro as soon as you tried to edit something in Photoshop or Lightroom or export something with iMovie. The M1 and M2 Macs also feel slower than their Pro, Max, and Ultra counterparts, but for the kinds of light-to-medium-duty work that I spend most of my time doing, I rarely find myself waiting around for things to happen.

That's why I've been looking forward to the 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been rumored for at least a year and is being released to the public this week . Before now, getting a larger Mac laptop meant paying at least $2,000 for the privilege—$2,500 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro—because getting that bigger screen also came with extra ports, more powerful chips, and fancier screen technology.

Enlarge / Apple's new Mac Studio offers the M2 Ultra chip, which, like its M1 counterpart, provides vastly greater computing power. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—The Mac Studio will be refreshed this summer with chips based on the M2, including the M2 Max and new M2 Ultra, the "most powerful chip" ever released "for a personal computer."

The M2 Pro and M2 Max have previously been seen in MacBook Pro models released late last year , but the M2 Ultra will be a first. In the M1 line, the Ultra was the top-of-the-line chip with substantially better performance than the Pro or Max—particularly in graphically intensive tasks. M2 Ultra will support 192 GB of unified memory, 800 GB/s memory bandwith, and a 24-core CPU and up to 76 cores of GPU. Apple claims the M2 Ultra will work 30% faster than the M1 Ultra, and that a single system with the Ultra can work machine learning datasets that would choke systems with discrete GPUs.

The M2 Max is "up to 50 percent faster" than the prior Max-based Studio, according to Apple, and features a 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, and up to 96 GB unified memory, with 400 GB/s memory bandwidth.

Enlarge / The latest MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon )

Apple’s latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros were released in January with new M2 Pro chips, alongside the new Mac mini with M2 and M2 Pro options. The range of configurations across these models offers users everything from a power-efficient document editor (though they'd certainly be overkill for that) to a full-on video and photo editing powerhouse.

Whichever you choose, you're likely going to need some accessories—that's the nature of things with any new PC purchase, but with Macs in particular. Given that, we examined a handful of accessories to complete the package and help you get the most out of your workstation.

Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and numpad for $160

(or without Touch ID and numpad for $99 )

Apple’s Magic Keyboard is my favorite keyboard pairing with either the MacBook or Mac mini. If you opt for the version with Touch ID, you gain the Apple-specific perk of unlocking your computer with your fingerprint. But aside from its Mac-compatibility, the main reason I use this keyboard is its battery life.

Enlarge / A woman uses AutoCAD on a MacBook Pro in this promotional image from Autodesk. (credit: Autodesk )

It has been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its massively popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to run natively on M1 and M2 chips.

The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on Autodesk's website on March 28. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflows, but the announcement that "for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips" is clearly the headlining feature.

Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support "can increase overall performance by up to two times" compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD.

Enlarge / The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

It looks like the first benchmarks of Apple's upcoming M2 Max chip have leaked in Geekbench's database.

When users run the over-the-shelf version of the Geekbench 5 benchmarking tool, the scores are logged to a public database of results and are tied to entries for specific hardware. In this case, the result (which was discovered by a Twitter user ) is listed under a product labeled "Mac14,6" running the as-yet-unreleased operating system "macOS 13.2 (Build 22D21)." The entry also noted that the chip had 12 cores.

The chip in question is likely destined for MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models that will launch sometime next year. As for the results: The overall single-core score is 1,853, and the multicore score is 13,855. The more granular scores like crypto, integer, and floating point generally track along the same lines when compared to this chip's predecessor, the M1 Max.

Enlarge / The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2021. (credit: Samuel Axon)

For months, there have been rumors that Apple would launch new, M2-based Macs—specifically MacBook Pro and Mac mini models with new M2 Pro or M2 Max chips—sometime before the end of this year. But now two usually reliable insiders and Apple CEO Tim Cook are signaling that those new computers will arrive sometime in early March instead.

During a recent call with investors last week, Cook began a sentence with "as we approach the holiday season, with our product lineup set," suggesting that there will be no new hardware announcements from Apple in 2022.

Further, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo tweeted several weeks back that he expects the new MacBook Pro models in early 2023.