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Last year’s spooky-themed MacBook release brought us the ultra-dark MacBook Pro with M3. This year’s “exciting week” of Mac news is bringing a lot less Halloween fanfare to Apple’s tried and true laptop brand, but this may be the year that the baseline MacBook Pro 14 finally has more staying power. The next versions of the MacBook Pro all sport an M4 or M4 Pro chip, but the 14-incher and the MacBook Air with M2 or M3 now start at a base 16GB of unified memory. Took them long enough.
Apple revealed the new slate of MacBook Pro models, all with the new M4 silicon. The base 14-inch MacBook Pro only has options for the regular M4 chip. The 16-inch MacBook Pro comes in M4 and M4 Pro flavors. The M4 first debuted with this year’s iPad Pro. That version of the chip included a 9-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, but this MacBook Pro 14-inch features the more powerful 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Apple revealed the M4 Pro chip alongside the shrunken-down Mac mini Tuesday. The next step up for the 16-inch MacBook Pro sits base with a 12-core CPU and 16-core GPU. We already got the hint about the M4 Max before launch, but the new chip is the top-end and most expensive version you can get on the MacBook Pro 16.
The new Pros use the same flat chassis design as the MacBooks that debuted in 2022. It’s a fine, light, and versatile laptop design, but we’re still not thrilled that the notch for the webcam remains in place.
Though any M-series Mac product will get the promised AI features for macOS Sequoia, the M4 chip is supposed to facilitate Apple Intelligence better than all other Apple-brand CPUs with a 16-core neural engine capable of running 38 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second. Computers’ neural processing units only work with background AI tasks, and anything more intensive will rely either on the Mac’s GPU or on Apple’s cloud infrastructure.
As an extra bit of news, Apple said the M2 and M3 MacBook Airs will now all sport 16 GB of RAM base. Sorry if you bought one last year with only 8 GB of RAM. The M2 model still starts at $1,000, the same as before.
As we’ve seen with the latest iPhones, Apple Intelligence is also pretty RAM intensive, which may be why Apple upgraded the 14-inch MacBook Pro’s memory. The Cupertino tech giant went on record to claim that 8 GB of RAM is good enough, despite the protests from modern PC enthusiasts. Back in June, XDA developers spotted a feature called Predictive Code Completion for M-series chips that requires at least 16 GB of unified memory. If Mac users were supposed to get everything out of their MacBook Pros, it’s clear Apple had to bite the bullet and pony up for more RAM.
Apple said it plans to pull the sheet off even more Mac products this week, so keep your eye out for even more new desktops and laptops.
