Especially with the Mac, Apple has this odd tendency to keep moribund parts of their lineup around while simultaneously going for a take-no-prisoners approach to rebuilding other lines. The bottom of their laptop offering seems to be the part that suffers the most from this — the Air has always sort of see-sawed between being the premium thin-and-light offering or the entry-level offering (with the 12" MacBook carrying the thin-and-light torch for a while).

Looks like right now the Air and the "proper" (14"/16") MBPs are the ones being propelled forward, while the 13" MBP is the moribund one.

Larger battery, active cooling, afaik the storage options go higher.

If you’re doing anything heavy that will put sustained stress on the machine, active cooling is the important difference. While the laptops may have identical CPUs, with only passive cooling the Air is going to get throttled down after a bit whereas the Pro won’t have to. If you’re going to do something like video rendering you’d notice the difference.

That machine shouldn’t exist - I don’t know why they kept it around. Maybe they just had lots of old hardware they wanted to try to unload.

They kept it around because:

1. They don't have something to slot between the Air and the 14" Pro. The much rumored 15" Macbook Air isn't ready yet.

2. With how wacky supply chains are, it makes sense to rely on a supply chain that has been working since 2016, the year the 13" MBP came out.

3. Apple needed a device with active cooling to show off the power of the M2.

Thanks for giving a heads up on the 15" Air on the horizon.

This would be the perfect computer for me, and probably most other pros in the current landscape - 13,4 is just too small for a lot of work, but few people need more power than an M1/M2.

I can see it's rumoured for spring next year, so a year is probably realistic.

You mean the lowest-specced M2 model for each? The ones that are $1199 for Air and $1299 for 13" MBP?

I noticed the tech specs for the lower-end air have a slightly lower M2 -- 8 GPU cores vs 10... and in the Air price tool, it's a $100 upgrade to go from 8-core GPU to 10-core.

So I guess that's it -- the low-end Air is a little lower-end and a little cheaper.

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe that the M2 MBP only exists to make the increased price on the Mac Book Air look more competitive.

It’s an old sales trick. Show the customer three products in different price ranges to get them to buy the middle one.

Slightly higher capacity battery is the only strictly better feature I can see in the MBP 13". Usually the MBP is a poor buy anyway. Better the 13" MBA or on the other side the 14" MBP.