Turbocharged Apple M4 Max Debuts Alongside Revamped MacBook Pros With More RAM

Apple just wraped up its week full of announcements with its refreshed MacBook Pro lineup, featuring the new family of M4 chips. The new laptops from the Cupertino-based company will offer an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, Thunderbolt 5 on M4 Pro and M4 Max models, an option of an all-new nano-texture display, and they'll start with 16GB of RAM on all models, which doubles the previous-gen.

Instead of one big event, Apple changed up its routine this week by spreading its announcements over three days. On Monday, the company introduced its new iMac lineup powered by the new M4 chip and Apple Intelligence. Then yesterday, Apple shined its light on the new Mac mini, which got a smaller footprint and a power button oddly on its bottom-side. And today, Apple has introduced its new lineup of MacBook Pro laptops.

“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,” remarked John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “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.”

The M4 family of Apple silicon was built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology. Apple remarked that the M4, combined with machine learning accelerators in the CPU, an advanced GPU, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine, are built for AI. The company added that with industry-leading performance per watt, the M4 family of chips helps deliver users up to 24 hours of battery life, despite their increased performance.

MacBook Pro With M4

The base M4 variant features a 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, and a faster 10-core GPU, and comes with a base of 16GB of unified memory with support for up to 32GB. The company claims the new M4 MacBook Pro is 1.8x faster than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 for tasks like editing gigapixel-resolution photos, and more demanding workloads.. It also boasts a Neural Engine that is over 3x more powerful than the M1.

The M4 MacBook Pro supports up to two high-resolution external displays in addition to the built-in display, and offers three Thunderbolt 4 ports for users to connect other peripherals.

MacBook Pro with M4 Pro

Need more power? Then perhaps the M4 Pro chip is for you. Apple says this chip is aimed at researchers, developers, engineers, creative pros, or anyone that needs even faster performance for more demanding workflows. The M4 Pro features a 14-core CPU with 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores for a jump in multicore performance. It also offers a 20-core GPU that is twice as powerful as the regular M4.

Apple remarked the new M4 Pro MacBook Pro gets a 75% increase in memory bandwidth over the prior generation, which is double that of any processors available for AI PCs. It is also said to be 3x faster than M1 Pro models.

MacBook Pro with M4 Max

For those who need all the power Apple silicon offers, there's the new M4 Max. The company says the M4 Max model is aimed at pros like data scientists and 3D artists. The M4 Max offers up a 16-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU, over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth, and a Neural Engine that is over 3x faster than M1 Max.

The new powerful chip is also said to deliver up to 3.5x the performance of the M1 Max, and supports up to 128GB of unified memory.

Other features Apple announced with its new M4 MacBook Pro lineup included an all-new nano-texture display option that is said to dramatically reduce glare and distractions from reflections, a new 12MP Center Stage camera that delivers enhanced video quality in challenging lighting conditions, and Thunderbolt 5 ports that more than double transfer speeds up to 120Gb/s.

Apple also announced that MacBook Air models with M2 and M3 chips will now start with a base memory configuration of 16GB as well, while keeping the starting price at $999.

The MacBook Pro 14-inch model is currently available for pre-order with a starting price of $1,599, and the MacBook Pro 16-inch model begins at $2,499.