Enlarge / Samsung's newly announced 990 PRO with Heatsink SSD. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung's 990 PRO, its latest NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, aims to give gamers, 3D-renderers, and 4K/8K video editors a decent ratio of price to performance if this top-of-the-line drive can get close to its promised specs in real-world testing.

The 990 PRO is touted as offering "nearly the highest speed currently available from the new PCIe 4.0 interface" and a 55 percent increase in random performance over its 980 Pro . Samsung touts sequential read and write speeds of 7,450 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 6,900MB/s, respectively. Random read/write speeds are listed at 1,400K and 1,550K IOPS, respectively, based on IOmeter 1.1.0 performance. DRAM for the 990 PRO drives is 1GB per terabyte of storage, up to 4GB for the 4TB model.

Samsung suggests the performance bump comes from its own V-NAND and proprietary controller advancements. Power efficiency is improved up to 50 percent over the 980 PRO, the company claims, while a nickel coating and heat-spreading label dissipate heat. The heatsink model gives you more temperature assurance while, of course, adding RGB lights.

Enlarge / Microsoft Teams running on a Mac. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced plans to roll out an Apple Silicon-native version of Microsoft Teams, but the release isn't going to happen overnight.

In a blog post on its website, Microsoft claims the update will offer "a significant boost in performance" to users of Macs with Apple's M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, and M2 chips.

Teams has just been running as an Intel app via Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs since the beginning of the Apple Silicon transition in 2020. Direct competitors Zoom and Slack have offered native Apple Silicon support since December 2020 and February 2021, respectively.

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  The MacBook Air after the teardown. [credit: iFixit ]

The M2 MacBook Air has been arriving to those who pre-ordered it over the past few days, and repair supplies vendor iFixit is among those who received a unit. If you've been tracking iFixit's work after other Apple launches over the past several years, you know what that means: teardown time .

Like the 24-inch iMac before it, the MacBook Air is mostly full of... a lot of empty space. The battery dominates the device's interior, but beyond that, we're mostly just looking at mechanisms for the trackpad, keyboard, and a small logic board.

The teardown revealed thermal paste and graphite tape, but no active cooling and not even a heat spreader. iFixit notes that the machine will likely run hot, which we found in our throttling tests .

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  The 16-inch MacBook Pro with its lid closed. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Second-generation refreshes of the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple's M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist—who has accurately reported on upcoming Apple products before—wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro is "likely to stay roughly the same," with no major new visual changes or features beyond what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that, unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more oriented toward heavy-duty workflows than the M2 that shipped over the past couple of months in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

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

The new MacBook Air is a remix—a bundle of ideas already seen in other Apple laptops, whether we’re talking about the previous MacBook Air , the 13-inch MacBook Pro , or the 14-inch MacBook Pro .

In that sense, it’s not too exciting since we’ve seen most of its individual features before. But it is interesting in another sense: It’s the first major redesign in years to Apple’s most popular laptop, what we’ve previously called the best Mac laptop for most types of users .

This flat, plain, slate-like machine is also a clean slate for the storied MacBook Air, and it’s the first time the Air has been redesigned around the company’s own silicon. Apple has improved on the previous design in almost every way, even though the laptop loses a bit of its unique identity in the transition. It’s still the best MacBook for folks who are OK with paying its relatively high purchase price, but it's not a mandatory upgrade over its M1 predecessor.

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  The screen on Apple's new MacBook Air. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

According to a new blog post by the company, Apple will begin taking orders for its newly redesigned 13.6-inch MacBook Air this Friday, July 8, at 5am PDT. The laptop will arrive at buyers' doorsteps and become available for same-day retail purchase one week later on Friday, July 15.

It will be the second Mac to launch with Apple's second-generation M2 system-on-a-chip, which follows 2020's M1 with substantially faster memory bandwidth and graphics and moderately improved CPU performance.

It's the same chip as that found in the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro, which we recently reviewed . We found that the M2 offered 10 to 15 percent improved CPU performance compared to the M1 and as much as 40 percent faster GPU performance with the 10-core GPU configuration. Unlike the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air defaults to an eight-core GPU configuration with an optional 10-core upgrade.

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  This is the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Apple's new 13-inch MacBook Pro is a little tough to recommend given the options in Apple's lineup, but that doesn't change the key takeaway: The new, second-generation M2 chip doesn't disappoint.

While Apple calls the 13-inch MacBook Pro its “most portable Pro laptop,” there’s nothing that’s particularly “Pro” about it. It has too few ports for power users, and it can't touch the 14-inch MacBook Pro in performance—yet it offers little to draw would-be buyers away from the similarly specced and soon-to-be-launched MacBook Air redesign .

That said, the real story is that this is the first laptop Apple released with its second-generation ARM-based processors for Macs. The M2 is an exciting follow-up to the already impressive M1 and a promising herald of what's to come to future Macs that deserve the Pro moniker.

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  Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro. [credit: Apple ]

The first machine with Apple's second-generation M2 system-on-a-chip is now available to order. Though it won't arrive until June 24, you can buy the new 13-inch MacBook Pro today. Apple is also now selling its new dual-port USB-C charger through its online store.

The 2022 refresh of the 13-inch MacBook Pro uses the same design and has all the same features as its 2020 predecessor, which used the M1 chip. The only significant difference is the inclusion of the M2, which Apple says can be up to 40 percent faster at some tasks than the M1.

The laptop starts at $1,299 for a configuration with 256GB of solid-state storage, and there's also a $1,499 configuration with 512GB. Beyond those base configs, you can further customize the 13-inch MacBook Pro with 8GB, 16GB, or 24GB of memory, and you can upgrade to 1TB or 2TB of storage. You cannot upgrade later, so those choices have to be made at the time of purchase.