Who it’s for
Read Mashable’s full review of the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).[1]
A majestic piece of modern machinery, Apple’s jacked new 16-inch, M4 Pro-fueled MacBook Pro is a future-proofed investment for creative professionals who run intense multimedia-editing apps and software on a regular basis.
Why we picked this
Put simply, this MacBook Pro is a beauteous behemoth. With a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 22,758, it’s the most powerful laptop we’ve ever tested by a not-close margin. (The runner-up, Lenovo’s $4,485 Legion 9i, scored a 17,711.) It “can handle heavy workloads without a single stutter,” said Gedeon. It’s also incredibly long-lasting, surviving for nearly 21 hours in our battery life benchmark. Out of all the MacBooks we’ve ever tested, it has the absolute best battery life.
While it may look like a pretty standard MacBook on the outside — minimalist, relatively thin, made from aluminum — Apple’s tacked on a few subtle but noteworthy design upgrades[2]. For one, it now comes with three next-gen Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports for zippy data transfer speeds. (These accompany an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, a MagSafe 3 charging port, and a headphone jack.) Two, it can hit up to 1000 nits of SDR brightness, a bump from 600 nits in its M3 Pro predecessor. There’s also a new option to add a glare-reducing “nano-texture” display finish, which wowed Gedeon when she took the laptop into her backyard: “I didn’t have to squint, adjust angles, nor 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[3], a new feature that produces an overhead view of the user’s desk.
Its six-speaker setup is the same one you’ll find in the M3-era Pros, but no complaints there. Gedeon likened its audio quality to a “gourmet apple pie … piping hot, golden, and worth every sinful 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 keeps it firmly in “experts-only” territory. (Our upgraded testing unit with 48GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and a nano-texture display came in at $3,649; the base configuration goes for $2,499.) Don’t bother with the splurge unless you’ll make full use of it on the daily. For what it’s worth, though, we also like the new 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro[4] for those with less strenuous workloads; that one starts at $1,599.
References
- ^ Read Mashable’s full review of the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Pro). (mashable.com)
- ^ upgrades (mashable.com)
- ^ (opens in a new window) (support.apple.com)
- ^ M4 MacBook Pro (mashable.com)