Last year’s spooky-themed MacBook release brought us the ultra-dark MacBook Pro with M3. This year’s “exciting week” of Mac news is bringing a lot less Halloween fanfare to Apple’s tried and true laptop brand, but this may be the year that the baseline MacBook Pro 14 finally has more staying power. The next versions of the MacBook Pro all sport an M4 or M4 Pro chip, with the M4 Max exclusive for the 16-inch versions. At the same time, everything, including the 14-incher and the MacBook Air with M2 or M3 starts at a base 16GB of unified memory. Took them long enough.
Apple revealed the new slate of MacBook Pro models, all with the new M4 silicon. The base 14-inch MacBook Pro only has options for the regular M4 chip. The 16-inch MacBook Pro comes in M4 Pro and M4 Max flavors. The M4 first debuted with this year’s iPad Pro. That version of the chip included a 9-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, but this MacBook Pro 14-inch features the more powerful 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, the same as the recently-announced new iMac. The big, most expensive version of the Pros with M4 Max can expect a 14-core CPU and 32-core GPU, at least.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro with base M4 starts at $1,600 with 512 GB of SSD storage. 1 TB options for the smaller Pro will cost $1,800 or $2,000, depending on whether you want 24GB of RAM. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro models of the 14-inch range from $2,000 to $3,200 without extra add-ons. The M4 Pro 16-inch MacBook Pros start at $2,500, but if you want the M4 Max model with a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, 48 GB of RAM, and 1 TB storage, you’ll be spending upwards of $4,000, or $5,000 if you want the maximum 128 GB of RAM.
Apple revealed the M4 Pro chip alongside the shrunken-down Mac mini Tuesday. We already got the hint about the M4 Max before launch, but the new chip is the top-end and most expensive version you can get on the MacBook Pro 16. Apple said the CPU in the M4 Max includes 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. Apple claims it packs four times the bandwidth of competing PCs with the latest AMD, Qualcomm, or Intel chips. We’ll be waiting to test those performance claims once we have those laptops.
The new Pros use the same flat chassis design as the MacBooks that debuted in 2022. It’s a fine, light, and versatile laptop design, but we’re still not thrilled that the webcam notch remains in place. Apple still promises stellar battery life on the Pro models alongside the mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR Display and a 12 MP webcam with the company’s Center Stage software.
One benefit of the new hardware is that the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max now supports Thunderbolt 5, promising 120 GB/s transfer speeds. There’s still the regular HDMI port, SD card slot, headphone jack, and MagSafe 3 charging port.
Though any M-series Mac product will get the promised AI features for macOS Sequoia, the M4 chip is supposed to facilitate Apple Intelligence better than all other Apple-brand CPUs with a 16-core neural engine capable of running 38 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second. Computers’ neural processing units only work with background AI tasks, and anything more intensive will rely either on the Mac’s GPU or on Apple’s cloud infrastructure.
As an extra bit of news, Apple said the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs will now all sport 16GB of RAM base. Sorry if you bought one last year with only 8GB of RAM. The M2 model still starts at $1,000, the same as before.
As we’ve seen with the latest iPhones, Apple Intelligence is also pretty RAM intensive, which may be why Apple upgraded the 14-inch MacBook Pro’s memory. The Cupertino tech giant went on record to claim that 8 GB of RAM is good enough, despite the protests from modern PC enthusiasts. Back in June, XDA developers spotted a feature called Predictive Code Completion for M-series chips that requires at least 16 GB of unified memory. If Mac users were supposed to get everything out of their MacBook Pros, it’s clear Apple had to bite the bullet and pony up for more RAM.
The new MacBook Pro models are available to preorder starting Wednesday and will ship by Nov. 8.
