The M4 MacBook Pro has finally landed, and with it come boosted performance and a whole stack of new features. It’s one of the biggest MacBook upgrades in the last few years.
Whether you’re unsure if it’s right for you or you just want to learn everything there is to know about the M4 MacBook Pro, we’ve got the answers here. Read on to see what’s new in Apple’s latest pro-level laptop.
Price and release date
Apple has a habit of launching new Macs in the fall, and this year was no different. The company announced the new M4-equipped MacBook Pro on October 30 and released a short promotional video alongside it. It followed the announcement of other new Macs earlier in the week, including an M4 iMac and an M4 Mac mini.
As for the price, we suspected that we might see an increase here, but Apple kept things as they were with the M3 generation. That means a starting price of $1,599 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 chip.
The MacBook Pro M4 is available for preorder now and will be available to purchase on November 8.
Performance
With the M4 MacBook Pro, Apple is offering three chip options: the M4, the M4 Pro, and the M4 Max. The performance you can expect obviously depends on which chip you pick, but each one offers noticeable improvements over their M3-generation predecessors.
Take the M4 chip, for example. With up to 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, Apple says this chip can process images in Affinity Photo up to 1.3 times faster than the M3, and up to 1.8 times faster than the M1. Going back further, the M4 can run that same Affinity Photo task seven times faster than the Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Core i7 chip. That’s an old device, but if you’re still on an Intel MacBook Pro, it’ll be a huge step up.
Apple also shed light on the new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips and their performance. The M4 Pro can be configured to have a 14-core CPU and a 20-core GPU, and it boasts 75% more memory bandwidth than the M3 Pro. Apple says it’ll give you twice the graphical performance of the M4 and 1.3 times faster 3D visualization in Cinema 4D compared to the M3 Pro.
The final chip in the lineup is the M4 Max, which is currently Apple’s most powerful Mac chip. It offers up to 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, and that makes for 1.2 times faster performance than the M3 Max (for both CPU and GPU) and four times the bandwidth of what Apple calls the “latest AI PC chip” (the company didn’t specify which chip it was referring to).
Elsewhere, Apple has doubled the starting memory of the M4 MacBook Pro, up from 8GB in the M3 model to 16GB in the latest edition. That should really help with multitasking, as well as with the Apple Intelligence tasks that the latest chips can handle.
That’s all very well, but what about real-world benchmarks? Well, we didn’t have to wait for reviews to see those, as a series of high-profile leaks before the MacBook Pro’s launch spilled the beans on almost everything you need to know about its performance.
For instance, Russian YouTuber Wylsacom got hold of one of the leaked M4 MacBook Pros and put it through its paces, and that included conducting a Geekbench test. This showed the M4 chip inside the laptop hit a single-core score of 3864 and a multi-core score of 15288. Those results are about 27% and 31% higher than the M3, respectively. A second leaked benchmark — this time for Apple’s Metal graphics API — has also surfaced, and it indicates that the M4 chip’s GPU is around 20% better than that found in the M3. Overall, that suggests a pretty noteworthy improvement over Apple’s previous chip.
Features
Aside from a new chip roster, the M4 MacBook Pro also comes with a handful of fresh features that make it worth considering.
If you opt for the M4 Pro or M4 Max models, you’ll get Thunderbolt 5 connectivity in its USB-C ports. This ramps up the data transfer speeds to 120Gbps fromfrom a maximum of 40Gbps in the previous MacBook Pro (which only worked with Thunderbolt 4).
Apple is now offering a nano-texture glass option for the MacBook Pro, the first time it has done so and also the first time this technology has been available outside the Pro Display XDR and the Studio Display. This should help reduce glare and distracting reflections. The mini-LED display in Apple’s laptop can also blast all the way up to 1,000 nits of SDR brightness, which is way above what any other laptop can bring to the table.
While we’re on the topic of the display, Apple has upgraded the webcam that sits inside the M4 MacBook Pro’s screen. Its resolution now hits 12 megapixels and it now works with Apple’s Center Stage feature, which automatically pans the camera to keep you in the middle of the frame as you move around the room. Finally, the webcam now works with Desk View, which shows a bird’s-eye view of your desk, as well as a front-on shot of you when you’re on a video call.
For years now, MacBooks have come with incredible battery life, and Apple has extended that further with the new M4 models. You can now expect up to 24 hours of juice, Apple says, although it’s not clear exactly what kind of usage that entails.
Oh, and there’s one more thing. The iPad Pro’s M4 chip comes with a built-in display engine that Apple says is used to “drive the stunning precision, color, and brightness” of the tablet’s OLED display. Given that the MacBook Pro uses the same M4 chip — presumably with the same display engine — does this mean an OLED display is coming to the MacBook Pro?
Perhaps, but don’t expect it any time soon. The latest predictions put the release date of the rumored OLED MacBook Pro anywhere between 2025 and 2027, so there’s still a while to go before Apple’s flagship laptop gets that long-awaited upgrade. But having a dedicated display engine in the M4 chip hints that it’ll arrive eventually.
Design
The design of the M4 MacBook Pro remains largely the same as that of its predecessor — it even uses the same box as the M3 MacBook Pro, which is something Apple has never done before. But there are one or two small design tweaks to look out for.
The most prominent one is the set of colors you have to choose from. The entry-level M4 MacBook Pro is now available in a Space Black color, something that was previously reserved for the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions of the laptop. This is something that was revealed in the prominent leaks that occurred a few weeks before the M4 MacBook Pro officially launched.
Apple has also upped the USB-C port count on the entry-level M4 MacBook Pro. You’ll now get three instead of the two that came with the M3 MacBook Pro. These ports are still Thunderbolt 4 on this model, but if you upgrade to the M4 Pro or M4 Max MacBook Pro, you’ll get Thunderbolt 5 connectivity instead (as previously mentioned).
There’s not much else to report on the design front. The latest MacBook Pro redesign happened in 2021, which isn’t that long ago in Apple’s timeline. The company redesigned its MacBook Pros in 2012, 2016, and 2021, and by that measure, the next one will probably happen around 2025 or 2026. So don’t get too excited for a chassis overhaul this year.
Looking slightly further ahead, the OLED MacBook Pro is a more probable candidate for a design change. Not only is it likely to fall within the date range mentioned above, but the tandem OLED panel Apple used in the M4 iPad Pro allowed that device to become noticeably thinner.
If Apple uses the same tech in the MacBook Pro — and given how expensive this tech would have been to research, we’re betting that it will — we might see a slightly thinner MacBook Pro when the OLED panel makes its debut in Apple’s laptop. That’s an idea backed by both Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, both of whom believe Apple aims to slim down a significant number of its products (including the MacBook Pro) over the next few years.
Software
We shouldn’t just focus on the hardware, as the M4 MacBook Pro received some pretty significant software upgrades too. For instance, there’s Apple Intelligence, the AI platform that Apple revealed at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2024. This is being infused right through Apple’s operating systems — for example, it lets the Mail app categorize your emails and rewrite them using a different tone of voice, and adds image generation and audio transcription tools to make working with media a little easier. Siri is also due for a major overhaul thanks to Apple Intelligence, and this update could mark the largest revamp in Siri’s history.
Apple Intelligence has landed in macOS Sequoia, albeit in a very limited fashion for the time being. Aside from Apple Intelligence, macOS Sequoia includes a range of new features for the M4 MacBook Pro (and any other Mac that can run it), including iPhone mirroring, window tiling controls, a new Passwords app, and more.
However, it’s worth noting that Gurman believes that some Apple Intelligence features won’t launch until 2025, and many of them didn’t arrive in time for the launch of the M4 MacBook Pro. That includes Siri’s ability to gain contextual awareness of what you’re doing on your device, as well as its power to control your apps, such as editing a photo, then emailing it to a friend. Other features, like Mail’s email sorting and the Swift Assist companion for Xcode, might drop in 2024, but they’re still too late for the M4 MacBook Pro launch.
Lastly, there have been rumors that an Apple Intelligence+ suite of advanced AI features could launch at some point, which would be a paid software bundle. That’s still just a rumor, though, so we don’t yet know if it would require the more capable Neural Engine that the M4 provides.
