A stunning piece of modern machinery, Apple’s new 16-inch, M4 Pro-fueled MacBook Pro is a future-proof investment for creative professionals who run intensive multimedia-editing apps and software on a regular basis.
Read Mashable’s full review of the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).
Simply put, this MacBook Pro is a beautiful giant. With a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 22,758, it’s the fastest laptop we’ve ever tested by a very slim margin. (The runner-up, Lenovo’s $3,599.99 Legion Pro 7i 16 OLED Gen 10, scored 20,369.) “It can handle heavy workloads without lag,” Gedeon said. It’s incredibly long-lasting, surviving for nearly 21 hours in our battery life benchmarks. It has the second-best battery life of any MacBook we’ve tested so far. This is really impressive, considering how powerful it is.
Although it may look like a pretty standard MacBook on the outside – minimal, relatively thin, made of aluminum – Apple has worked on some subtle but notable design upgrades over the last generation. For one, it now comes with three next-generation Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports for zippy data transfer speeds. (They also come with an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 charging port, and a headphone jack.) Two, it can reach up to 1000 nits of SDR brightness, up from 600 nits in its predecessor, the M3 Pro. There’s also the option to add a glare-reducing “nano-texture” display finish, which surprised Gedion when she took the laptop into her backyard: “I didn’t have to squint, adjust angles, or play hide-and-seek with shadows,” she wrote. And three, the new MacBook Pro’s camera is now a 12MP center stage shooter (up from 1080p) with support for Desk View, a new feature that generates an overhead view of the user’s desk.
Its six-speaker setup is the same as what you’ll find in M3-era Pros, but no complaints there. Gedeon compared its audio quality to “delicious apple pie… very hot, golden and worth every calorie”.
And by calories, we mean dollars. It’s tempting to recommend the M4 Pro MacBook Pro to anyone who values power efficiency in a laptop, but its price point puts it firmly in “experts-only” territory. (Our upgraded test unit with 48GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and a nano-texture display comes in at $3,649; the base configuration goes for $2,499.) Don’t bother with the extravagance unless you use it daily. However, for its price, we also like the new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro for those with less demanding workloads; That starts at $1,599.