In its third and likely last Mac announcement this week, Apple revealed updates to the MacBook Pro line of laptops, which includes Pro and Max variants of the M4 chipsets in the same 14-inch and 16-inch form factors we’ve seen in the MacBook Pro line for the past few years.
According to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering:
MacBook Pro is an incredibly powerful tool that millions of people use to do their life’s best work, and today we’re making it even better. With the powerful M4 family of chips, and packed with pro features like Thunderbolt 5, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, an all-new nano-texture display option, and Apple Intelligence, the new MacBook Pro continues to be, by far, the world’s best pro laptop.
Regarding the M4 family of chips, Apple says:
Built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 family is the most advanced lineup of chips for a personal computer. The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU performance with the world’s fastest CPU core,2 along with outstanding multithreaded CPU performance for the most demanding workloads. Combined with machine learning accelerators in the CPU, an advanced GPU, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine, Apple silicon is built from the ground up to deliver incredible performance for AI. Together with faster unified memory, each chip also includes increased memory bandwidth, so large language models (LLMs) and other large projects run smoothly and on device.
The company also released a video touting the changes to the MacBook Pro line:
Highlights of the revised MacBook Pro line include:
- Thunderbolt 5 ports on the Pro and Max models
- Thunderbolt 4 on the base model M4 MacBook Pro, including an additional third port
- Storage options ranging from 1TB to 8TB depending on the model you choose
- A nano-texture display option
- Support for two external displays
- A 12MP Center Stage Camera like the one on the iMac released earlier this week
- Up to 24 hours of battery life
- A 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16–32GB of memory with 120GB/s of bandwidth on the entry-level M4 MacBook Pro
- A 14-core CPU and a 20-core GPU on the M4 Pro version of the MacBook Pro
- A 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and up to 128GB of memory on the M4 Max version of the MacBook Pro
- Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3
I’ve been using an M3 MacBook Pro for about a year, and it’s a fantastic laptop. With the added speed and Thunderbolt 5, the latest MacBook Pros should be an attractive upgrade for a lot of users. I look forward to seeing how they stack up in real-world tests against previous models of Apple’s high-end laptop.
The new MacBook Pro is available for pre-order today, with deliveries and in-store availability beginning on November 8th. The M4 MacBook Pro starts at $1,599, the M4 Pro model starts at $1,999, and the M4 Max model starts at $2,299.
