Last year’s spooky-themed MacBook releases brought us the Ultra-dark MacBook Pro with M3. This year’s “fun week” for Mac news brings a little bit of Halloween fun to Apple’s tried-and-true laptop brand, but this may be the year that the basic MacBook Pro 14 finally has a lot of staying power. Subsequent versions of the MacBook Pro all sport the M4 or M4 Pro chip with the M4 Max exclusive to the 16-inch versions. At the same time, everything, including the 14-incher and MacBook Air with M2 or M3 now starts at 16GB of integrated memory. It took them long enough.
Apple has unveiled a new slate of MacBook Pro models, all featuring the new M4 silicon. The base 14-inch MacBook Pro has only the standard M4 chip options. The 16-inch MacBook Pro comes in M4 Pro and M4 Max flavors. The M4 was first released with this year’s iPad Pro. That version of the chip includes a 9-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, but this MacBook Pro 14-inch includes a more powerful 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, similar to and the newly announced iMac. The larger, more expensive version of the Pros with the M4 Max can expect a 14-core CPU and a 32-core GPU, at least.
The base 14-inch MacBook Pro 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 24 GB of RAM. Meanwhile the 14-inch M4 Pro models range from $2,000 to $3,200, with no extras. 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 40-core GPU, 48 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, you’ll be spending more . of $4,000, or $5,000 if you want the maximum 128 GB of RAM.
Apple unveiled the M4 Pro chip alongside the slimmed-down Mac mini on Tuesday. We already got hints about the M4 Max before the launch, but the new chip is the most advanced and expensive version that you can find in the MacBook Pro 16. Apple said that the CPU in the M4 Max includes 12 cores and four cores work well. . Apple claims its packaging has four times the bandwidth of competing PCs with the latest AMD, Qualcomm, or Intel chips. We’ll wait to test those performance claims once we have those laptops in hand.
The new Pros use the same flat chassis design as MacBooks starting in 2022. It’s a nice, simple, and flexible laptop design, but we’re still not happy with the webcam notch staying in place. Apple still promises excellent battery life in the Pro models alongside a mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR Display and a 12 MP web camera with the company’s Center Stage software.
There is one advantage of new hardware. MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max now supports Thunderbolt 5, which promises a transfer speed of 120 GB/s. There’s still the usual HDMI port, SD card slot, headphone jack, and MagSafe 3 charging port.
While any M-series Mac product will get the promised AI features of macOS Sequoia, the M4 chip should facilitate Apple Intelligence better than any other Apple-brand CPU with a 16-core engine neural network capable of running 38 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second. Neural computing processing units only work with background AI tasks, and anything deeper will rely on a Mac’s GPU or Apple’s cloud infrastructure.
In other news, Apple said the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs will now sport 16 GB of RAM. Sorry if you bought last year with only 8 GB of RAM. The M2 model still starts at $1,000, as before.
As we have seen with the latest iPhones, Apple Intelligence also has excellent RAM, which is probably why Apple has improved the memory of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The Cupertino tech giant went on record saying that 8 GB of RAM is good enough, despite protests from modern PC enthusiasts. Back in June, XDA Developers spotted a feature called Predictive Code Completion for M series chips that required at least 16 GB of integrated memory. If Mac users were to get everything in their MacBook Pros, it’s clear that Apple should have bitten the bullet and gotten more RAM.
The new MacBook Pro models are available for pre-order from Wednesday and will ship on November 8.
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