Tech

In some ways, my review of the new MacBook Pros will be a lot like my review of the new iMac. This is the third year and fourth generation of the Apple Silicon-era MacBook Pro design, and outwardly, few things have changed about the new M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max laptops.

Here are the things that are different. Boosted RAM capacities, across the entire lineup but most crucially in the entry-level $1,599 M4 MacBook Pro, make the new laptops a shade cheaper and more versatile than they used to be. The new nano-texture display option, a $150 upgrade on all models, is a lovely matte-textured coating that completely eliminates reflections. There’s a third Thunderbolt port on the baseline M4 model (the M3 model had two), and it can drive up to three displays simultaneously (two external, plus the built-in screen). There’s a new webcam. It looks a little nicer and has a wide-angle lens that can show what’s on your desk instead of your face if you want it to. And there are new chips, which we’ll get to.

That is essentially the end of the list. If you are still using an Intel-era MacBook Pro, I’ll point you to our previous reviews, which mostly celebrate the improvements (more and different kids of ports, larger screens) while picking one or two nits (they are a bit larger and heavier than late-Intel MacBook Pros, and the display notch is an eyesore).

New chips: M4 and M4 Pro

That leaves us with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max.

We’ve already talked a bunch about the M4 and M4 Pro in our reviews of the new iMac and the new Mac minis, but to recap, the M4 is a solid generational upgrade over the M3, thanks to its two extra efficiency cores on the CPU side. Comparatively, the M4 Pro is a much larger leap over the M3 Pro, mostly because the M3 Pro was such a mild update compared to the M2 Pro.

The M4’s single-core performance is between 14 and 21 percent faster than the M3s in our tests, and tests that use all the CPU cores are usually 20 or 30 percent faster. The GPU is occasionally as much as 33 percent faster than the M3 in our tests, though more often, the improvements are in the single or low double digits.

For the M4 Pro—bearing in mind that we tested the fully enabled version with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, and not the slightly cut down version sold in less expensive machines—single-core CPU performance is up by around 20-ish percent in our tests, in line with the regular M4’s performance advantage over the regular M3. The huge boost to CPU core count increases multicore performance by between 50 and 60 percent most of the time, a substantial boost that actually allows the M4 Pro to approach the CPU performance of the 2022 M1 Ultra. GPU performance is up by around 33 percent compared to M3 Pro, thanks to the additional GPU cores and memory bandwidth, but it’s still not as fast as any of Apple’s Max or Ultra chips, even the M1-series.

M4 Max

And finally, there’s the M4 Max (again, the fully enabled version, this one with 12 P-cores, 4 E-cores, 40 GPU cores, and 546GB/s of memory bandwidth). Single-core CPU performance is the biggest leap forward, jumping by between 18 and 28 percent in single-threaded benchmarks. Multi-core performance is generally up by between 15 and 20 percent. That’s a more-than-respectable generational leap, but it’s nowhere near what happened for the M4 Pro since both M3 Mac and M4 Max have the same CPU core counts.

The only weird thing we noticed in our testing was an inconsistent performance in our Handbrake video encoding test. Every time we ran it, it reliably took either five minutes and 20 seconds or four minutes and 30 seconds. For the slower result, power usage was also slightly reduced, which suggests to me that some kind of throttling is happening during this workload; we saw roughly these two results over and over across a dozen or so runs, each separated by at least five minutes to allow the Mac to cool back down. High Power mode didn’t make a difference in either direction.

We shared our data with Apple and haven’t received a response. Note that we tested the M4 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and we’d expect any kind of throttling behavior to be slightly more noticeable in the 14-inch Pro since it has less room for cooling hardware.

The faster result is more in line with the rest of our multi-core tests for the M4 Max. Even the slower of the two results is faster than the M3 Max, albeit not by much. We also didn’t notice similar behavior for any of the other multi-core tests we ran. It’s worth keeping in mind if you plan to use the MacBook Pro for CPU-heavy, sustained workloads that will run for more than a few minutes at a time.

GPU performance in our tests varies widely compared to the M4 Max, with results ranging from as little as 10 or 15 percent (for 4K and 1440p GFXBench tests—the bigger boost to the 1080p version is coming partially from CPU improvements) to as high as 30 percent for the Cinebench 2024 GPU test. I suspect the benefits will vary depending on how much the apps you’re running benefit from the M4 Max’s improved memory bandwidth.

Power efficiency in the M4 Max isn’t dramatically different from the M3 Max—it’s more efficient by virtue of using roughly the same amount of power as the M3 Max and running a little faster, consuming less energy overall to do the same amount of work.

Finally, in a test of High Power mode, we did see some very small differences in the GFXBench scores, though not in other GPU-based tests like Cinebench and Blender or in any CPU-based tests. You might notice slightly better performance in games if you’re running them, but as with the M4 Pro, it doesn’t seem hugely beneficial. This is different from how it’s handled in many Windows PCs, including Snapdragon X Elite PCs with Arm-based chips in them because they do have substantially different performance in high-performance mode relative to the default “balanced” mode.

Nice to see you, yearly upgrade

The new MacBook Pros are all solid year-over-year upgrades, though they’ll be most interesting to people who bought their last MacBook Pro toward the end of the Intel era sometime in 2019 or 2020. The nano-texture display, extra speed, and extra RAM may be worth a look for owners of the M1 MacBook Pros if you truly need the best performance you can get in a laptop. But I’d still draw a pretty bright line between latter-day Intel Macs (aging, hot, getting toward the end of the line for macOS updates, not getting all the features of current macOS versions anyway) and any kind of Apple Silicon Mac (fully supported with all features, still-current designs, barely three years old at most).

Frankly, the computer that benefits the most is probably the $1,599 entry-level MacBook Pro, which, thanks to the 16GB RAM upgrade and improved multi-monitor support, is a fairly capable professional computer. Of all the places where Apple’s previous 8GB RAM floor felt inappropriate, it was in the M3 MacBook Pro. With the extra ports, high-refresh-rate screen, and nano-texture coating option, it’s a bit easier to articulate the kind of user who that laptop is actually for, separating it a bit from the 15-inch MacBook Air.

The M4 Pro version also deserves a shout-out for its particularly big performance jump compared to the M2 Pro and M3 Pro generations. It’s a little odd to have a MacBook Pro generation where the middle chip is the most impressive of the three, and that’s not to discount how fast the M4 Max is—it’s just the reality of the situation given Apple’s focus on efficiency rather than performance for the M3 Pro.

The good

• RAM upgrades across the whole lineup. This particularly benefits the $1,599 M4 MacBook Air, which jumps from 8GB to 16GB
• M4 and M4 Max are both respectable generational upgrades and offer substantial performance boosts from Intel or even M1 Macs
• M4 Pro is a huge generational leap, as Apple’s M3 Pro used a more conservative design
• Nano-texture display coating is very nice and not too expensive relative to the price of the laptops
• Better multi-monitor support for M4 version
• Other design things—ports, 120 Hz screen, keyboard, and trackpad—are all mostly the same as before and are all very nice

The bad

• Occasional evidence of M4 Max performance throttling, though it’s inconsistent, and we only saw it in one of our benchmarks
• Need to jump all the way to M4 Max to get the best GPU performance

The ugly

• Expensive, especially once you start considering RAM and storage upgrades