Yesterday at the Apple event, Apple announced the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the new M1 chip, its first in house SoC for the Mac and like in the new Mac mini and MacBook Air it enables more performance, less energy usage and in the laptops – much better battery life.

The new MacBook Pro is the same price as before, at £1,299 in the UK and $1299 in the US and it replaces the outgoing entry level MacBook Pro 13-inch, the one with two Thunderbolt ports. Apple is still leaving some Intel models in the line up for now.

The new model has much better battery life than before, thanks to the M1 chip – for video playback for example, it has gained 10 hours from 10 hours to 20 hours. For wireless web browsing, it is now 17 hours of battery.

Like the other two new Macs, the specs are pretty much the same with the M1 chip with an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and the option of 8GB or 16GB of unified memory (RAM). Storage options are 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB SSD – the same as the Mac mini and MacBook Air.

Pre-orders for the new MacBook Pro 13-inch started yesterday, with deliveries starting on the 17th November.