Apple MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: A Capable Laptop That Plays It Safe

Months ago, a friend asked me whether he should buy an M3 MacBook Pro on sale or wait for the one with an M4. He’s a video producer and wanted something that would be his mainstay Mac for many years. That was such a difficult question to answer. At the time, we only had rumors about the M4 MacBook Pro 14 that’s now set for release on Nov. 8. We already had the iPad Pro with the M4 in hand, and all the rumors suggested Apple’s next laptop would be a very barebones refresh. I told him to go with the M3. Now, I get to see if I am right.

When Apple showed off an M4 version of the MacBook Pro 14, again with the same screen and chassis, I knew the big question of “buy/not buy” would come down to performance. What’s more, the base M4 version doesn’t come with many new features. It doesn’t get the Thunderbolt 5 support as the M4 Pro or M4 Max. The only real upgrade besides the chip was a brighter screen at SDR.

I’ve spent a week with the $1,600 MacBook Pro 14 with M4 and the $2,500 MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro. The new 14-inch comes in Space Black, and I prefer that to the silver of previous MacBooks. It’s got impeccable battery life, excellent performance for its size, a quality display, and a price tag that stings the eyes as much as it does the wallet. It’s the same as it ever was, including that bloody notch spearing through the center of the display.

So, what should you do if you have an old MacBook Pro with an Intel chip and are considering upgrading? Well, in your case, you’ll be perfectly happy with the new MacBook Pro 14. Use it for a week, as I have, and you’ll want it to become your permanent daily work computer. Beyond that, it has a subtle and strong capacity for intensive GPU tasks like rendering and even some gaming, though you won’t be playing every game at the full 3024 by 1964 resolution.

The new screen is slightly brighter for SDR content, and you can finally expect 16 GB of RAM at the base price. We spent years hearing Apple reiterate that 8 GB is good enough for the least expensive MacBooks, but now, with Apple Intelligence on the horizon, it seems that a bare amount of memory didn’t cut the mustard. At the very least, you don’t need to pay more for the privilege of what’s become standard RAM size.

It is faster than the MacBook Pro 14 with M3. Apple promised and delivered on that point. Apple is still winning in battery life. PCs might offer lesser benchmarks, but with the latest Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm ARM-based CPUs, Windows machines are catching up on battery life, if not in the rat race for overall performance. It’s best-in-class, but the strain on the current chassis is starting to show. If I had to answer my friend now retroactively, I’d tell him he’s absolutely fine getting an M3 at a discount. Performance and screen brightness improvements are welcome, especially if you haven’t jumped on M-series chips. If this latest M4 doesn’t do it for you, then nothing will.

MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: Performance

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The $1,600 price tag seems relatively routine, but Apple has a habit of getting you to spend more. My review unit of the M4 MacBook Pro provided by Apple included the bare 10/10-core M4 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage. The extra SSD space necessitates dropping an extra $200. If you want to use this machine for years, you’ll want the extra drive space.

My model is as close to the bare-bones MacBook Pro 2024 experience; even then, it’s a quality machine. With the base specs, I saw excellent benchmark results across the board. It hands a slap to both the AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 chip and Intel’s Core Ultra 7 256 V and 258 V in Geekbench 6 CPU tests, as if there was any doubt. That said, it’s difficult to find the highest-end chips from Intel or AMD out in the wild. You won’t find a top-end Snapdragon X Elite with the X1E-84 in anything but the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (at $1,750 MSRP, though likely on sale for less), but the M4 is still holding an edge against most smaller laptop chips in its class, like the Dell XPS 14.

Apple said you should get a boost in speed for rendering purposes. Our tests in Blender, where we rendered a BMW under both CPU and GPU settings, saw the M4 could do the scene in two minutes and 42 seconds compared to the M3 would do it in three minutes and 36 seconds. It’s a sizable jump and far better than most lightweight laptop CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 256 V. It was slightly slower than the $1,500 Asus TUF Gaming A14 with the AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 chip. The M4 beats AMD’s laptop CPU in Geekbench and Cinebench tests, but it’s a good reminder that benchmarks aren’t everything.

The M4 on MacBook has 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, which is slightly better than the 9 GPU cores on the iPad Pro version of the M4. The question now becomes whether users can expect better graphics performance for GPU-intensive tasks. I tried the MacBook Pro 14 with several games, including Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding: Directors Cut. Both games defaulted to a lower-than-native resolution. I can get between 70 and 80 FPS on mid-to-high settings with both games.

However, if you want to jump to the native 3024 by 1964, you’ll see that the frame rates drop below the playable. Even with MetalFX upscaling turned to performance mode, you won’t get much past 40 FPS in the best scenarios. It’s a similar story with Baldur’s Gate III. On medium preset settings, I can get upwards of 60 FPS indoors and outdoors and an average of 45 in the city of Act III. If you try for the higher resolution, AMD’s FSR only does so much to put you above 35 FPS.

Overall, you won’t get much better for the price point. It can do a lot in a small package at $1,600 (though likely $1,800).

MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: Build Quality and Display

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

There’s a lot to like and plenty to dislike about the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the same as ever. You get an SD card slot, an HDMI port, Thunderbolt 4, and the MagSafe 3 charging capabilities. It’s not as flashy as the Thunderbolt 5 on the Pro models, but it’s still as solid and quiet as ever.

The new MacBook Pro 14 has a brighter display for watching content in direct light. I tested the old MacBook Pro 14 with M3 and got around 260 nits of full-screen brightness compared to 360 nits full screen on the new model. You won’t notice much difference side by side except when sitting under the blinding rays near a window. My 14 also included a nano-texture display, which reduces glare and reflections. In reality, it diffuses the light rather than directly reflecting it.

Nano-texture can indeed reduce reflections from indirect light, but for the extra $100, it’s not necessary. I held the MacBook Pro 16 without nano-texture up to direct sunlight and could barely spot a difference. Thanks to the brighter screen, the M4 MacBook Pro 14 is already better off in that regard. And if it wasn’t clear already, Apple’s mini-LED blend of Liquid Retina XDR display is a colorful way to watch your streaming content. The sound, too, is solid and loud enough for you or your friends huddled around the 14.2-inch screen.

Even if the screen is brighter, it’s not as bright as the iPad Pro with M4’s tandem OLED design. I know I’m singing to the choir, but I can’t wrap my head around the idea we may have to wait several years to get an OLED MacBook Pro. This week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported the OLED MacBook got pushed until 2026 at the earliest. That’s more than disappointing; it’s practically rage-inducing. Mini-LED with Apple’s regular Liquid Rentina XDR has deep blacks and looks colorful. Still, I’ve spent an entire year with excellent displays like the one on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and in comparison, Apple seems stuck in the past, especially when I’m spending more than $1,600 on a laptop.

The newer MacBooks include a 12 MP webcam with the touted Center Stage feature that subtly moves the camera to keep you in frame for video calls. It works well enough. It won’t follow your face all the way out of the frame if you fall asleep and tip back 90 degrees in your chair during a work call. The camera also allows for desk view. This splits the image up between your face and your desk. It’s a handy feature if you’re trying to show your coworkers how to do origami, and it’s clearly a boon for getting your parents to finally understand what buttons they need to push to screenshot on their laptop.

Again, I feel like a scratched record, repeating old, tired lines over and over. The MacBook Pro 14 is still stuck with the same old Magic keyboard and trackpad. If you’re used to the Air models, the Pros’ keyboard will likely feel more springy than its ultra-thin counterpart. Otherwise, it’s passable, though it’s certainly not my favorite laptop keyboard for typing. The trackpad does the job, but it does not feel like much of an ice rink, and it does not look like asphalt either. Perhaps it’s the humdrum that makes it hard to feel much more than apathy for this design, but I know there are better-feeling laptops out there, and I’m itching for Apple to make any damn improvement to this staid design.

MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: Battery Life

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

After a full, nine-hour workday of near-constant use, I was sitting at 30% battery left. I was typing near-constantly, on high brightness, and running a variety of browsers, Slack, and whatever other apps took my fancy.

In our battery tests, where we ran a laptop on low brightness with a 24-hour YouTube video, the MacBook Pro 14 landed at 55% after 12 hours. That’s slightly worse than the MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro, but it’s a good outcome nonetheless.

It’s also no surprise. Running at full brightness continuously over a workday, even after performing several tests, I could get at least 9 hours of life without seeing the battery gauge dip into the red. As usual, Apple’s blend of efficient chips and hardware helps it stand out in terms of battery life. The latest Intel Core Ultra and Qualcomm Snapdragon chips promise obscene battery life. Still, in our tests on lightweight machines like the Lenovo Yoga 7x or the Asus Zenbook S 14, they don’t hold a candle to Apple’s Pro models.

MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: AI Capabilities

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

MacOS 15 Sequoia already brought us some great features, like iPhone mirroring. If you’re a mainstay Apple user, mirroring is useful for pulling up your phone and screen without glancing back and forth. The other small changes to Safari and Control Center are all nice. You get Sequoia if you’re using any MacBook Pro from 2018 or later. You only get the latest 15.1 and upcoming 15.2 Apple Intelligence features if you happen to have an M-Series MacBook. It’s clearly an extra feature Apple’s trying to give to get more Intel users to upgrade, but just how much of an impact does the latest software have?

I used the stable version 15.1 for my first few days on the MacBook Pro, then tried it with the 15.2 developer beta. 15.1 is nothing to write home about, literally. AI summaries for some of your Mail messages and AI notification summaries don’t offer many specifics to help you sift through the noise. Text summaries often leave out important details in emails or messages. I have no use for a writing tool that will confidently lie about anything it does not know.

While 15.1 is blasé, 15.2 gets weird. It finally implements ChatGPT into Siri and gives you access to the Image Playground AI art generator. Just like regular ChatGPT, you have a limit for how many responses you can receive unless you pay for ChatGPT Plus. Even then, Siri doesn’t always use ChatGPT. I’ve been reading Madeline Miller’s wonderful Odyssey retelling, Circe, and I wanted to know more about Homer’s epics for context. Siri, through ChatGPT, offered me a barebones response about the true ending to The Odyssey but sent me the usual list of links if I asked it about the differences between Miller’s work and the Greek tales. Siri, through ChatGPT, will rob text wholesale from Wikipedia and present it in a chopped-up, badly formatted paragraph. You can choose whether or not to use ChatGPT for every request, at least. The chatbot is occasionally helpful, but not any more than a typical Google search already is. You also don’t have easy access to your ChatGPT log if you decide to click away.

Image Playground, as it stands in beta, is worse than pointless. It only exists to generate cartoonish-looking headshots. It can do that for you if you want to know what you’ll look like in a dog suit with a bland, plastic-like face. Then again, it still needs work even for that. A bare prompt sometimes generates alien text at the bottom of the image, which is an artifact from the training data containing images with embedded text.

I need to note that any of the 15.2 features are in beta and will probably improve to some degree in the early December release.

MacBook Pro 14 2024 Review: Verdict

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

This is the best 14-inch MacBook released thus far, but that was inevitable. Apple still manages to keep the lead on performance and battery life in laptops, even if its edge is narrowing yearly. The M4 is a very solid chip, and now you can feel safe knowing you’re getting a standard RAM hit compared to past baseline MacBook Pro models.

Plus, it has a slightly brighter screen and better GPU performance for gaming, at least for what few games exist on Mac. So what’s keeping me from foaming at the mouth over Apple’s next-gen laptop? It’s just that I fear I’ll have to say all the same things again next year. I don’t expect Apple to come out with a new design every trip around the sun, but if the performance bump doesn’t excite you, this machine will be equivalent to every other Pro model from the past several years.

Apple Intelligence is coming to every M-series Mac. If you’re truly curious about Apple’s AI capabilities in 2025, you don’t have to jump on the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4, despite the boost in AI processing. I would tell my friend he’s safe enough on M3. He’s safe enough on M4. The only thing he’s not safe from is the disturbing Image Playground-generated images. Their dead eyes will haunt me in my sleep.