A beautiful machine: one week with an M4 Pro MacBook Pro

The new MacBook Pro is everything you expect: faster, better and more capable than before. While you can say that about every new Mac, the move to Apple Silicon means Apple can introduce vastly improved systems almost every year — something that was not always possible before.

I tested a beautiful Space Black MacBook Pro with the new M4 Pro chip and 48GB memory (which I would treasure if it belonged to me). The 3-nanometer chip it uses has 14 cores, consisting of 10 performance and four efficiency cores; it has a 2TB drive; a Liquid Retina XDR nanotexture display; and it costs $3,349.

What you already know

You already know everything you need to know about the all-new M4-series MacBook Pro systems. You know what they look like, that they are considerably faster, deliver extensive battery life, and are packed with more memory than Apple has pre-installed in Macs before. These AI PCs, of course, will run Apple Intelligence and any third-party generative AI systems you want to throw at them and are capable of handling incredibly intensive tasks. (When they do, they do not become hot enough you can fry an egg on them.)

You also know they run macOS, and (as virtual machines) run Windows really well if you also install Parallels. They also run most popular flavors of Linux in VM. They’re the most stable and inherently secure PC’s you can get, and if you are running a fleet of them you also know they’re less expensive to run in terms of tech support and other costs of ownership.

That’s the reputation these new Macs carry, and every single claim is true; it is why these Macs almost always win the PC group tests.

Test scores

I ran a few tests.

Geekbench 6

Open CL: 69,201

Single Core: 3,964

Multi Core: 22,952

There are multiple scores for these systems (Mac16,8) now available on Geekbench. These all confirm this kind of power.

Cinebench

I ran the Multi Core test using CinebenchR23. CPU results yielded 22,056 points for multi-core performance and 2,188 for single-core. The Mac utterly dominated single-core testing and comfortably took third in multi-core tests, eclipsing most AMD and Intel chips. 

Blender

Blender has its own benchmarks, which it has aggregated from users of its software. These give the equivalent Mac a median score of 2,547.97, which basically means Blender performance will be only slightly slower than what you can expect from a much more expensive Apple system running an M2 Ultra chip. 

Valley

I even tested the Mac using Valley. That test forces the Mac to render a selection of graphically intensive moving images, which makes it a neat way to put the GPU through its paces. This is no longer a fair test, however, as Valley isn’t optimized for Apple Silicon and relies on Apple’s Rosetta technology to work.  Despite which, the Mac flew, reaching an average 127.9 fps without switching on the fan. 

Apple wins the race

This level of performance — and annual improvements in that performance — could never have been achieved before the introduction of Apple’s M-series chips. Apple Silicon stands far ahead of the pack of Intel Core Ultra 200 chips or AMD Ryzen AI 9HX 370s (catchy name) — even the widely praised Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. 

Really, truly, Apple now leads in the processor wars. Dollar-for-dollar, and most especially, watt-for-watt, you can absolutely expect Macs running these M4 Pro chips to handle pretty everything you throw at them — in a portable Apple supercomputer you can use on battery and trundle to your next destination tucked away under your arm. Capable of delivering 8.6 teraflops of performance, it’s the computer most in the AI development industry are using; they need this level of performance and know Apple’s Macs deliver.

Apple

What are they for?

What all the performance data really means is that these Macs are more powerful than the superpowered Mac Studio or Mac Pro desktop models introduced in 2023. Want to edit a movie using pro apps like Adobe Premier or Apple’s Final Cut Pro? These machines are for you. It doesn’t stop at editing — they’re solid performers for color grading, motion graphics creation, CAD applications, RAW image editing, data modeling, structural engineering, advanced statistical analysis, even building, compiling, and testing new AI models. 

That performance also means that if you must run some legacy apps using Windows, you can — and you might find that even in emulation mode, the Mac runs Microsoft’s OS faster than most PCs. If you’re a gamer, you’ll be happy; World of Warcraft: The War Within performs 16.7 times faster than it did on an Intel-based MacBook Pro, Apple said. And these computationally intensive tasks can be done wherever you happen to be, thanks to the battery life of 24 hours. 

What about the display?

The test system I used had a nano-texture display to reduce glare and reflections. This is great for using the Mac outdoors in sunlight, and while the technology does make for a slight reduction in contrast if you look closely, this is more than offset by the image clarity. If you intend to use your new Mac when out and about, the $150 extra for nano-texture is a good investment.

When it comes to image clarity and color accuracy, you get a display capable of outputting color at the same degree of accuracy as reference systems users paid $40,000 or more for just five years ago. That’s the beauty of the Liquid Retina XDR display, which also means you can look at the display side on and still discern what it is showing. Apple has also switched to a Quantum Dot film in the display, which is a layer of phosphorescent crystals situated between the backlight and the display’s color filter that help make color more vibrant, accurate, and bright.

Otherwise, you can expect industry-leading 1600 nits of peak brightness and 1000 nits of sustained brightness for HDR and SDR content. The Mac is smart in other ways, too, and can adjust brightness all the way down to 1 nit in low-light situations. Put all of this together and what you get is a professional display in a professional notebook, which matters if your work requires staring at that display all day.

Want to use an external display? You can. While I was only able to test this with one external display, the MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip can drive up to two external displays in addition to the built-in display

Battery life

“Oh,” you exclaim, “but the bright display and powerful processor must eat away battery life.” While it depends on what you do, that isn’t necessarily so. Apple promises this MacBook Pro can handle up to 22 hours of video streaming and up to 14 hours of wireless web browsing.

In my experience, Apple’s battery life claims easily stand up – the only way you’ll really see battery life drop fast is if you want your Mac to start rendering large video files or preparing massive data sets for export. Oddly enough, the best way I found to easily test this was to set Valley’s test onto an endless loop. After eight hours, my beautiful Space Black Mac was still happily chugging away.

I humbly suggest that means unless you’re really pushing those processor cycles, your Mac will carry on doing whatever it is you need for a return journey between London and New York, even if you forget to bring your power cable with you. Oh, and one more thing, if you unplug your Mac, you’ll see no reduction in performance. 

Speaking to friends

Of course, if you’re staying across the ocean you might want to speak with your colleagues, family, or friends. The good news there is that the 12-megapixel webcam (1080p HD) brings Apple’s on-board camera a little further into the 21st Century.

The follow up good news is that it’s the AI Apple created in support of that camera that really does that job. Contrast will be good, even when you are backlit by a window; Center Stage will keep you in the frame without getting in the way; and Desk View gives people you speak with a good perspective on what your fingers are doing.

Of course, a good camera for video conferencing is one thing, but you also need good sound; again, Apple’s deep investments in digital sound tech is easy to hear in these Macs. The six-speaker system delivers a beautiful wide stereo sound, which means whether you’re listening to music, watching a Dolby Atmos movie, or listening to someone who loves the sound of their own voice blaring on during an endless weekly meeting, you’ll be cocooned in a cloud of sound. And if you want to output sound to a bigger system, you’ve even got a headphone port.

Summing up

Power users will be thrilled that these Macs support up to 128GB of high-bandwidth memory, which will make a big difference to 3D and AI professionals. It’s also true that users shifting video assets between multiple codecs will find they can do that while still handling tasks like color and effects processing — and if you’re trying to open a large file, the speed of the SSD is as “Pro” as everything else in this machine.

These really are pro machines, with an illuminated keyboard, outstanding built-in microphones, the productivity-boosting tools in Apple Intelligence, and the now iconic (thin and light) MacBook Pro design. You even get a polishing cloth! 

The only snag? You might not need one.

These are astonishingly portable, amazingly powerful computers that look great and sound better. However, most of us aren’t doing the computational equivalent of joining the queue to climb Everest or investigating vast data sets toward building a vaccine against cancer. Instead, we’re playing some games, surfing the internet, shifting our identities to BlueSky from Twitter, and writing a couple of word processing documents. 

Think of it this way: I’m writing this using a beautiful MacBook Pro that I can only ever aspire to.

This computer is born for speed, bred for performance, and hungry to handle some really demanding tasks. But perhaps you only really need a MacBook Air. The way I see it, if Apple were a horse breeder, then M4 Pro MacBook Pros are outstanding thoroughbreds absolutely born for world-class performance and speed, while the MacBook Air is a slightly slower but also desirable long distance runner.

I think almost every Mac user will continue to aspire to owning a thoroughbred. These Macs deliver everything we expect and cement Apple’s reputation as the world’s best racehorse breeder. No one else is consistently churning out such champions today.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Also by Jonny Evans:

Review: The M4 iPad Pro — an amazing AI PC

Google’s Gemini app is now available on iPhones

Apple’s iPhone partners make plans for US manufacturing

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