Apple MacBook Pro M4 Review: When is the right time to upgrade?

Apple’s upgrades in the MacBook Pro M4 are nice, but as always you should consider what you’re switching from before buying.

Score: 3/5

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In this review

MacBook Pro M4 Specifications
MacBook Pro M4 Design
MacBook Pro M4 Performance
MacBook Pro M4 Battery
MacBook Pro M4 Conclusion

Apple’s shift to Apple Silicon is, by this stage, rather old news, but that puts it into the position of having to justify annual in-house upgrades on a regular basis across its lines.
The M4 series of chips first saw its debut on the iPad Pro M4 before making its way to the iMac M4, Mac Mini M4 and of course the MacBook Pro M4.

While Apple made some changes to the iMac and some bigger ones to the Mac Mini, for the MacBook Pro M4, it’s pretty much business as usual, which means that the processor upgrades have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make them worthwhile.

I’ve taken my time with this review – I’d rather do these kinds of things right rather than just blitzing to be “first” – but as a result I’m aware that there’s a lot of reviews out there that cover off the MacBook Pro M4, some good, some… not so good.

So I’m taking a slightly different tack here, looking rather specifically at the MacBook Pro M4 through the lens of upgrading from an older model.

That doesn’t mean if you’re a complete newcomer to the MacBook Pro line that there’s nothing for you here (please continue reading!), but I am assuming you’re at least au fait with what a MacBook Pro is, and I’ll mostly be highlighting the differences in this year’s model for those pondering if it’s time to move on up the MacBook Pro line.

Design

This looks familiar. Really familiar.

Apple is a company that trades heavily on the design of its devices, with an eye towards a premium look and feel. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s always that innovative with those designs, and that’s absolutely true for the MacBook Pro M4.

Available in either a 14 inch or 16 inch size option – the model loaned to me by Apple Australia was the 14 inch variant – you’re still looking at either a Space Grey or Silver body, which is in line with the “Pro” positioning of these laptops, but also not that exciting.

There are some upgrades that did excite me, though to differing degrees. There’s an option for the MacBook Pro M4 to have a nano-texture display, something that Apple previously only offered on its pricey Pro Display XDR screens (and also the new iMac M4 models), and the model loaned to me was one of those.

Adding a Nano Texture to your MacBook Pro's screen will cost you an additional $230, and for that you get a display that has much better glare resistance in direct sunlight. Putting it side by side with the MacBook Pro M3 Max in an outdoor environment, and the differences were immediately apparent.

Is that worth $230?

It’s really going to depend on where you do most of your laptop work. Within an indoor setting the differences are minimised down to better viewing angles, and that’s arguably only going to matter if you’re working collaboratively and need to show your screen to other people on a frequent basis.

Those who work with absolute colour accuracy in mind will almost certainly be working from a properly calibrated external display whenever they can, but if you’re not the kind of “Pro” who works a lot outdoors, while it’s a nice to have feature, it’s not going to be absolutely vital for every user.

Ports for everyone! (But not at the same speed for everyone...)

What did excite me more was the fact that the Apple MacBook Pro M4’s design has now standardised across three Thunderbolt/USB-C ports on all models, where last year’s model only had that on the pricier M3 Pro/Max variants.

You do get a specification difference with the M4 Max/Pro versions, however, as they’re Thunderbolt 5 where the baseline MacBook Pro M4 is only Thunderbolt 4 if those speed differences matter to you.

You also get MagSafe charging, though honestly I've not really used it while testing out the MacBook Pro M4, because it'll charge quite nicely over USB-C anyway.

I get that Apple's ploughed money into developing the MagSafe connector and there's probably patents in play here too, but it almost feels vestigial at this point. I'd certainly get a lot more use out of omitting the MagSafe port that can't be used for anything else in favour of an additional Thunderbolt port -- am I alone in that thinking?

Those two factors excluded, this is a MacBook Pro, just like any other MacBook Pro you’re likely to have come across. If you’re totally new to the lineup, they’re solidly built machines.

The MacBook Pro keyboards is OK – but not my favourite laptop keyboard, but still better than those terrible butterfly mechanism ones that infested MacBooks for way too long a few years ago – and if I were picking, I’d opt for the 14 inch model for portability over the 16 inch, but I accept that’s very much a question of working needs and preferences rather than one being immediately “better” than the other.

Performance

Of course, the real work that the MacBook Pro M4 has to do to convince you that it’s worth buying is all under the hood and in the hands of the M4 processor that you choose.

Outside of screen size differences, you can also opt for the baseline MacBook Pro M4, the mid-range MacBook Pro M4 Pro or the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro M4 Max. If you do want the MacBook Pro 16 inch model with an M4 processor, that only comes in M4 Pro or M4 Max configurations.

We’re not done yet, however, because there’s also choices even within there in terms of CPU and GPU configurations, from a baseline of a 10-core CPU/GPU arrangement in the 14 inch MacBook Pro up to a 16-core CPU/40-core GPU in the 16 inch MacBook Pro 16.

One nice step that Apple’s taken is to standardise on a minimum of 16GB of RAM across all MacBook Pro lines, distinct from the measly 8GB that used to be the standard.

My inner cynic does still wonder if that’s more to do with factory line simplification than anything else, but it’s still nice to see. As a reminder, if you want more RAM or internal storage on any Apple product right now, buy it upfront, because the nature of the “Apple Silicon” approach means that these machines are not upgradeable in any way.

Apple sent me a just-slightly-upgraded-from-baseline MacBook Pro M4, specifically the model with a 1TB SSD rather than 512GB, and the aforementioned Nano-texture display option in play. That bumps the entry level $2,499 price up to $3,029. It is notable that this is slightly cheaper than the equivalent models were last year, not that you could get the Nano Texture display then.

All the hype is around performance, so let’s see what all of that means. Here I have an interesting group of results to compare with and see how the MacBook Pro M4 stacks up.

Here’s how it compares against quite a wide range of prior Mac models using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

It’s not exactly surprising that last year’s MacBook Pro M3 Max beat out the baseline MacBook Pro M4, because that’s a substantially more expensive and specced-out system.

What’s interesting here is seeing where the baseline MacBook Pro M4 compares down the chart, because you’re essentially getting MacBook Pro M2 Max performance from the entry level processor choice.

At a GPU level, I have fewer benchmarked systems to compare against. Here’s how the MacBook Pro M4 compares using Geekbench 6’s GPU test:

To give some slightly more real-world use GPU comparison, here’s how it compares using Cinebench 2024:

Once again, the M3 Max über alles, but then you’d be pretty annoyed if you’d spent the $7,249 that Apple wanted for that system last year only to find it being beaten handily by a unit costing $4,220 less this year, wouldn’t you?

What this does point to though is that if you’re looking to upgrade, it’s not really worth doing for anything newer than an M2 series model, and even there at this baseline it’s likely to be marginal unless you’re doing some pretty heavy duty number crunching or video editing or other processor-intensive tasks.

In those cases, however, it feels pretty obvious to say that the M4 Pro or M4 Max might suit your needs better, but I don’t have comparable numbers to conclusively show how much better they might be.

All of this is exclusionary, by the way, of “Apple Intelligence”, the company’s big push into AI services that may use the processing power of M4 in some interesting ways.

That’s mostly because at the time of writing and testing, Apple Intelligence had yet to launch to non-US English markets, so I couldn’t fairly assess it.

Given the evolution of AI models over time, I get the feeling that’s likely to be something of a moving feast (or possibly famine) anyway.

Battery

Even within its Pro space, Apple is never that precise when it comes to battery life figures. For the MacBook Pro M4 as tested, the claim is for up to 24 hours of video streaming or up to 16 hours of wireless web. I’m going to presume that somebody at Apple forgot to add either the words “work” or “surfing” on the end of “web” there.

One of the big touted benefits of Apple Silicon is meant to be its improved battery performance over the Intel processors Apple used beforehand, and that was very obvious from the first generation of Apple M-series processors.

That journey isn’t over yet, with the M4 improving over the baseline M3 by two hours of video playback or an hour or of wireless web (web spinning? web doomscrolling?) usage, as per Apple’s figures.

Does that play out in real life? Here I’ve got to give some qualifications, because the immediately comparable machine I’ve got to test against is the M3 Max, and that model only claims 18 and 12 hours respectively. That’s the price you pay for more processing power, naturally, because that kind of work takes serious energy.

My practical appreciation here is that while I haven’t seen the MacBook Pro M4 last a whole lot longer than the M3 Max does with my typical workloads when away from power, it’s effectively at that level where for most professional uses at most levels, it’s “enough” for a day’s work without too much fuss.

Obviously if you are cranking out the 8K videos all day long without plugging in you’ll still go flat, though.

Apple MacBook Pro M4:
Alex’s Verdict

When Apple announced the MacBook Pro M4 lineup, I did comment at the time that it felt more like a specification bump than anything else, especially in the wake of the iMac M4 and Mac Mini M4.

Turns out that I’m way smarter than I look, because that’s very much what the MacBook Pro M4 is.

Where that leaves it in the upgrade cycle is that it’s in no way a sensible upgrade from an M3 model, and even the use case for M2 MacBook Pro owners is a little sketchy unless you’re really feeling like you’re pushing the capabilies of your M2 MacBook Pro to its limits.

If you’re coming from an M1 or older Intel-based MacBook Pro model however, the differences really are quite profound.

If you have stuck with me through this and you’re looking to buy your first MacBook Pro rather than upgrade, the news here is a little bit better again.

The 2024 MacBook Pro M4 is a fine machine that’s a little less expensive than last year’s entry level model was, though you can blow that saving away entirely if you opt for the Nano-Texture display.

It’s well built and quite powerful, though I’d also suggest that unless you do need that Pro power, if you’re keen on a Mac, the MacBook Air, even though it’s only sitting as an M3 unit, is still the one to buy.

Apple MacBook Pro M4:
Pricing and availability

Pricing for the MacBook Pro M4 in Australia starts at $2,499. The model as tested (M4 10 Core CPU/10 Core GPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Nano-Texture Screen) costs $3,029 at the time of writing.

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