Rumors are heating up that the M4 MacBook Pro is due to launch in the next few weeks. But what exactly can you expect to see in Apple’s upgraded laptop? Will it be worth your hard-earned cash, or should you stick with an older model?
We’ve scoured the rumor mill to find the answers, and worked out what sort of performance, features, and designs we might see. If you’re interested in learning more about the upcoming M4 MacBook Pro, you’re in the right place.
Price and release date
Apple has a habit of launching new Macs in the fall, and it looks like this year will be no different. Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has tapped his sources and reckons that Apple has earmarked November 1 as an on-sale date for the new M4 MacBook Pro.
Working backward, we can use some back-of-the-envelope math to estimate when Apple might reveal the M4 MacBook Pro to the world. New Apple devices typically go on sale in stores a week after preorders open, which suggests preorders will begin on Friday, October 25 (that’s one week before the November 1 on-sale date). Preorders themselves tend to start on the Friday after an Apple event. The company usually likes to host events on Mondays or Tuesdays, giving us an announcement date of either Monday, October 21, or Tuesday, October 22.
As for the price, an increase here is definitely possible, albeit by no means guaranteed. Apple has taken to bumping up the prices of its MacBook Pro models in recent years, and we could see the same again for the M4 generation.
However, display industry expert Ross Young says he’s “surprised the OLED iPad Pros are priced as low as they are given the high price of the tandem OLED panels, along with a costly M4 chip.” While we aren’t expecting an OLED display in the next MacBook Pro, an M4 chip is a certainty, and its extra capabilities could lead Apple to bump the price of its laptops by a small amount (perhaps around $100). That’s all speculation for now, though.
Performance
Throughout October, a series of high-profile leaks spilled the beans on almost everything you need to know about the M4 MacBook Pro. One of those areas is the machine’s performance, which we now know a little bit about thanks to some leaked benchmarks.
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.
Specs-wise, these benchmarks indicated that the M4 has a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, something that mirrors what we’ve seen in the iPad Pro’s M4 chip. The CPU is split into two core clusters, one with four cores and another with six cores. This likely represents the division of the chip into four Performance cores and six Efficiency cores that we’ve seen in the iPad Pro’s M4. Finally, Geekbench also revealed that the M4 chip comes with a base clock of 4.41GHz and 16GB of memory.
That last aspect — the memory — is something we also saw on the packaging for the leaked M4 MacBook Pro. It’s significant, as the current M3 MacBook Pro starts with just 8GB of memory. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says he believes the leaked MacBook Pros represent the entry-level model, which means you’ll get double the memory right out of the box compared to the previous MacBook Pro. That should make a big difference to multitasking and RAM-heavy workloads.
There are a few other things that we can learn about the M4 chip’s performance. Apple has previously announced that the M4 is made using a second-generation 3nm process that “further advances the power efficiency of Apple silicon.” In the iPad Pro, Apple says that the M4’s CPU is 1.5 times faster than that found in the M2, while the GPU boasts four times faster rendering performance than the M2. It also comes with dynamic caching, ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading, all technologies that could give a notable boost to Mac gaming performance.
However, there’s no indication yet of what we can expect from the more advanced chips in the M4 lineup: the M4 Pro, M4 Max, and M4 Ultra. We’ll have to wait until Apple shares more details on those.
The Neural Engine also received a speed boost in the M4 iPad Pro, and we know that it will be responsible for handling a lot of the M4 MacBook Pro’s on-device AI features. This could make it faster than the cloud-based processing that will be needed for MacBooks with lesser AI capabilities.
Features
Intriguingly, 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 the MacBook Pro will use the same M4 chip — 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.
On the battery front, chances are that this will stay roughly the same as it is right now. The current M3 MacBook Pro offers up to 22 hours of video playback and 15 hours of web browsing, according to Apple, and this could be the case with the M4 MacBook Pro. Apple tends to keep the battery output of its Apple silicon laptops fairly similar over generations, preferring instead to increase performance. The M4 iPad Pro has the same 10-hour battery life as its predecessor, reinforcing this idea.
Design
The leaked M4 MacBook Pros offered up some fascinating insights into the design changes we can expect in the upcoming laptop. For one thing, the devices come with three Thunderbolt ports instead of the current MacBook Pro’s two. As well as that, the Thunderbolt slots on the leaked MacBook Pros are Thunderbolt 4 versus the M3 MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt 3, which should bring an increase in capabilities to the high-speed port (such as greater external display support and more data bandwidth).
The leaked laptops also show another change: a Space Black color option. Previously, this was limited to the M3 Pro and M3 Max versions of the MacBook Pro. Now, it looks like Apple is bringing it to the base M4 model as well.
Other than that, though, it doesn’t look like we should expect much more 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. That’s probably a bit too far out for the M4 MacBook Pro, though.
Software
We shouldn’t just focus on the hardware, as the M4 MacBook Pro is due for 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 Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes that some Apple Intelligence features won’t launch until 2025, so they might not 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 after the M4 MacBook Pro launches.
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.
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