On February 1, a large Samsung Unpacked event will take place, within which the premiere of both the new flagship phones of the Galaxy S23 series and the new Galaxy Book3 series laptops is expected. At the disposal of an insider known on Twitter under the nickname SnoopyTech, there were data on the cost of Galaxy Book3, Galaxy Book3 360, Galaxy Book3 Pro, Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 and Galaxy Book3 Ultra in Europe.

The most interesting thing is the cost of the flagship model Galaxy Book3 Ultra. As you can see, the laptop will not be cheap. For a version with a Core i9-13900H processor, GeForce RTX 4070, an AMOLED 3K screen, 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of flash memory, they will ask for almost 4000 euros! Judging by the announcements at CES 2023 in early January, many gaming laptops with GeForce RTX 4080 graphics will be more affordable. But the Galaxy Book3 Ultra is, of course, not about pure performance, but about maximum performance in the most compact device.

As for the simpler version of the Galaxy Book3 Ultra, there will be a Core i7-13700H and GeForce RTX 4050. Well, in the base one, apparently, there will be the same Core i7-13700H, but without discrete graphics.

We already wrote about the characteristics of the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro: these laptops (in two formats – with screens with a diagonal of 14 and 16 inches) will be equipped with a Core i5-1340P and Core i7-1360P CPU, and dGPU is not provided for them.

Earlier, SnoopyTech published high-quality renderings of the Asus Zenfone 9 and Xiaomi 12T Pro before their official premiere.

iFixit disassembled the new 14-inch MacBook Pro on the SoC M2 Pro and found that its construction and interior design are almost identical to the predecessor model.

As you can see, the differences between the two MacBook Pros on early platforms are minimal, ranging from large parts to the location of various chips on motherboards.

iFixit followed Apple’s disassembly guide, which is 160 pages long. The process is very time consuming, but there is nothing new in relation to the previous model. The score for maintainability is also low: 5 points.

The first tests of the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini on the Apple M2 platform may disappoint potential buyers of these devices: it turned out that all these versions of Apple computers in their basic versions received slower SSDs than their predecessors on the SoC M1.

So, for example, the maximum read and write speeds of 512 GB SSD data in the 14-inch MacBook Pro on SoC M2, measured in the BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​Test, were 2970 and 3150 MB / s, respectively. In comparison, the 512 GB SSD of the past MacBook Pro on SoC M1 in the same application shows read and write speeds of 4900 and 3950 MB / s, respectively. The difference is significant: the new model SSD is about 39% slower in reading data and 20% slower in writing it.

Decreased reading and writing speeds were also recorded for the MacBook Air and Mac Mini on the M2 with a 256 GB SSD. So, for example, if the read and write speeds of a 2020 Mac Mini on SoC M1, measured using Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test, are 2854 and 2733 MB / s, respectively, then in the case of a 2023 Mac Mini on SoC M2, read and write speeds dropped by almost half – to 1482 and 1431 MB / s, respectively.

What is the reason for this “downgrade”? The thing is that Apple uses larger memory chips. So, for example, if the 2020 Mac Mini has two 128 GB NAND chips, then the 2023 model has only one NAND chip (this, by the way, also applies to the model with 512 GB of memory). Accordingly, two chips allow you to perform read and write operations in parallel, but one does not. The 2023 MacBook Pro in the example above only has two memory chips, while its predecessor had four.

The good news is that in top configurations, the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with 1-2TB SSDs are just as fast as their predecessors.