Apple Announces New MacBook Pros With M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max Chips

Apple is continuing to refresh its Mac lineup with M4 chips this week. After announcing new M4-powered 24” iMac and Mac mini models earlier this week, it’s now the turn of the MacBook Pro: There’s a new base 14” MacBook Pro model with an M4 chip, plus 14” and 16” versions with more powerful M4 Pro and M4 Max chips.

Compared to the previous model with an M3 chip, the base 14” M4 MacBook Pro comes with 16GB of unified memory (up from 8GB) which can now be bumped to 32GB (previously 24GB). It still offers 512GB of storage, but this now upgradable to 2TB. The new model also includes 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports compared to 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 ports on the previous model.

Other notable updates include a slightly brighter display (up to 1000 nits for SDR content) with a new nano-texture display option. There’s also an improved 12MP Center Stage camera with support for Desk View, and the new M4 chip also delivers battery life improvements: Apple promises up to 16 hours of wireless web usage (up from 15 hours on the previous model) and up to 24 hours video streaming (up from 22 hours).

“With M4, MacBook Pro is up to 1.8x faster than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 for tasks like editing gigapixel photos, and even more demanding workloads like rendering complex scenes in Blender are up to 3.4x faster. With a Neural Engine that’s over 3x more powerful than in M1, it’s great for features in Apple Intelligence and other AI workloads,” Apple said today.

This new 14” M4 MacBook Pro starts at $1,599, and it will start shipping alongside other M4-powered Macs on November 8.

New 14” and 16” MacBook Pros with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips

Apple also offers new 14” and 16” MacBook Pros with the same M4 Pro chip that’s available on the redesigned Mac mini that was announced yesterday. The M4 Pro comes with 14 CPU cores, up to 20 GPU cores, and up to 64GB of unified memory with 273GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple says this is a 75% increase over M3 Pro and “2x the bandwidth of any AI PC chip.”

Compared to MacBook Pro models with an M1 Pro chip, Apple says that the M4 Pro is up to 3x faster. Just like the new M4 Pro Mac mini, M4 Pro versions of the 14” and 16” MacBook Pro add support for Thunderbolt 5 and its 120Gb/s data transfer speeds.

For users who need even more performance, Apple’s new M4 Max chip comes with a 16-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple emphasized that this was “4x the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip.”

“With M4 Max, MacBook Pro delivers up to 3.5x the performance of M1 Max, ripping through heavy creative workloads like visual effects, 3D animation, and film scoring,” Apple explained.” And with the powerful Media Engine in M4 Max, which features two ProRes accelerators, MacBook Pro performance is amazing even when taking 4K120 fps ProRes video captured with the new iPhone 16 Pro and editing it in Final Cut Pro.

The 14” MacBook Pro with M4 Pro starts at $1,999, and the 16” model with M4 Pro starts at $2,499. The 14” model with an M4 Max chip starts at $3,199, and and the 16” model at $3,499. All of them are also available for pre-order today and will start shipping on November 8.

All MacBook Airs now come with 16GB of memory

This was an unexpected surprise, but all M2 and M3 MacBook Air models now come with 16GB of unified memory instead of 8GB. And Apple is doubling the memory on these MacBook Airs while keeping the same $999 starting price.

While Apple didn’t explicitely mention it today, 16GB of unified memory should definitely help to make Apple Intelligence features work better on these Macs. On Monday, macOS Sequoia 15.1 enabled a first set of Apple Intelligence features in the US, with more to follow later this year.