Apple MacBook Pro 16 2024 Review: This Is Why You Get the Big Mac

Apple’s new MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro is not carrying the old idiom, “what’s old is new again.” Simply put, what’s old is old, what’s new is new, and it’s bringing all the baggage from past generations. The MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro sports the same look and chassis we’ve seen for the last three years. There’s an existential quality to the latest MacBooks. You know they’ll be powerful. You know they’ll last you a good, long while. You know it so well that you may struggle to justify the upgrade.

But if you were sitting there wondering which is better, the M4 or the M4 Pro chip, the latter is leagues more powerful. The M4 Pro by itself is capable of competing against desktop-level CPUs in some of our tests. Rendering is a breeze, and with the 20-core GPU variant, it’s perfectly capable of maxing out several of the games available to Apple’s desktop ecosystem (which, despite Apple’s gaming initiatives, is still paltry compared to PC). The new big MacBook is better on its own than the M3 Max from last year. Plus, the M4 Pro has access to the High Power Mode settings previously only available on the Max chips, allowing better control of how much oomph you allow your MacBook.

For all that promised power, this is still an expensive laptop. Our 16-inch M4 MacBook Pro review unit included the M4 Pro with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, plus 48 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. All totaled up, this configuration would set you back $3,500. The lowest-end M4 Max configuration starts at that same price. The base model at this screen size is $2,500, already a princely sum. Compare that to high-end PCs with a discrete GPU, and you can find excellent gaming laptops like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i for hundreds of dollars less. I would die for a MacBook with a keyboard like the ones you see on the latest, greatest gaming laptops, but there’s no such luck.

And yet, the MacBook Pro 16 is a productivity beast, beating the competition in all the benchmark tests except for graphics. It’s so similar to last year’s that I’m starting to wonder what other use cases there could possibly be for Mac, especially for M4 Pro or M4 Max chip. Sure, there’s Control, Frostpunk 2, now on Mac natively, and finally, Cyberpunk 2077 is rolling into the station come 2025. The M4 Pro can game, but you’ll be depressed if you dare look at Steam library’s Mac compatibility.

Even with the promise of more future titles, gaming can’t be your one big reason to upgrade to the more expensive Mac. Apple hopes that anybody still using a MacBook Pro and an Intel Chip from before 2020 will feel enticed to drop it for an M-Series MacBook. If you fit the bill and you’ve been eyeing an upgrade, this is the best one yet. Just don’t assume Apple Intelligence will change your world. It can’t possibly do so until 2025, if ever.

MacBook Pro 16 2024 Review: Performance

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

Since this year’s design is so similar to the MacBook Pro with M3, the Pro with M2, and the M1 Pro and Max designs from 2021, performance really matters. The M4 Pro is a powerhouse that managed to beat last year’s M3 Max in many of our tests. Even more than that, it tested better than I had thought it would.

The M4 Pro is a huge step up from what you get if you opt for the cheapest MacBook Pro 14. Benchmark results clearly beat out the base M4 chip as dramatically as the M3 Max did to the bottom-end M3 from last year. In Geekbench 6, the M4 was 67 points better in single-core than the MacBook Pro 14 and close to 7,800 points in multi-core settings. The M4 Pro scored one of our best times for our Handbrake tests, transcoding a 4K video into 1080p.

It also scored above or at par with the M3 Max MacBook Pro 16 in most tests, save for graphics-specific tasks. The CPU could finish our Blender test, where we forced it to render a scene of a BMW in one minute and 34 seconds, just two seconds slower than the M3 Max.

Compared to an Intel Core i9-14900K, the M4 Pro beats it by around 800 points in single-core and 1,900 in multi-core settings with Geekbench 6. A desktop PC with a discrete GPU may still win out for the sake of rendering tests, but if you compare it to the Intel Core i9-14900HX in a big laptop like the Razer Blade 16, the M4 Pro wins by more than 200 points in multi-core tests.

Apple seems to think the M4 Pro is a gaming-ready chip. I ran it with several games and found that, yes, it’s perfectly capable of playing demanding titles with relative ease. Apple likes to mention the hardware-accelerated ray tracing support on M4. I tried the Myst remake, and at full resolution and ray tracing, I was at stable, sub-60 FPS framerates, although the glitchy ray-traced lighting on water surfaces routinely tanked performance.

Resident Evil 4 could offer between 100 and 120 FPS at high settings at a 1920 by 1200 resolution. If you max out the resolution, you can expect between 45 and 60 FPS, which you can boost by increasing the MetalFX upscaling from “Quality.” It’s the same story with Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, with FPS that never dipped despite the ray tracing in the background.

In Baldur’s Gate III, I could get more than 90 FPS indoors and between 60 and 70 FPS outdoors, though at a lower-than-native resolution. Going up to the screen’s 3456 by 2234 resolution required enabling AMD FSR or else dialing back the settings to get playable framerates. You can’t expect much more from a computer without a discrete GPU, but it bodes well for any future titles coming to Mac if and when they do.

Let’s break it down. The power-per-square-inch is why you should opt for the M4 Pro over the base 14-inch M4 models. You should still look towards a quality PC if you want a mobile gaming computer. If gaming is secondary to your Mac usage, The MacBook Pro 16 is at least capable of handling whatever is thrown its way.

MacBook Pro 16 2024 Review: Build Quality and Display

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The notch is still there, the bane of my Mac screen experience, the eye of Sauron that Apple refuses to topple. I don’t need a cutout on my display. I want it gone, but that’s not in the cards for this MacBook refresh. It’s another hard pill to swallow because the mini-LED “Liquid Retina XDR” display is already a quality screen; I would want Apple to maximize all the screen real estate it can. I understand some people don’t enjoy the iPhone’s dynamic island, but surely it’s a better option than what we’ve gone through with Apple’s laptops, right? Besides, a new screen may finally mean a transition to OLED. Imagine the iPad Pro’s tandem OLED on a MacBook. Come on, manifest it with me.

There’s now an option among the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 for the Cupertino company’s touted “nano-texture” to reduce reflections and glare. Apple said it sent me a MacBook Pro 14 with the nano-texture and the 16 model without it. However, I found my 16 model seemed more matte than the 14. The difference was obvious side-by-side with the M3 MacBook Pro.

However, the new, higher brightness on the 16-inch display did more to offset issues than a texture. In direct light through a window, I could honestly not tell much of a difference between one with it and one without. Compared to the IPS LCD MacBook Air 15, both the min-LEDs did a better job reducing glare. I would suggest saving your money and opting for the regular screen. Perhaps doubly so since Apple still wants you to buy a $19 polishing cloth for the nano-texture. Our advice: don’t.

It’s still a pretty laptop, to be sure, and in my opinion, it’s prettier without nano-texture. The blacks are not going to have the inky quality of OLED (and perhaps we might finally see that OLED Mac in 2025), but they’re deep enough to feel satisfying when gaming or streaming. As for the few other minor changes, there’s a new upgrade to the port selection.

I still feel satisfied with the I/O on the Pro models. There’s the SD card reader, four USB-C ports, an HDMI port, and Apple’s proprietary MagSafe 3. All the versions of the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and M4 Max, alongside the M4 Pro-powered Mac mini, now include Thunderbolt 5 instead of 4. Thunderbolt 4 capped out at 40 Gbps bandwidth speeds. The upgrade offers 80 Gbps base bandwidth capacity and a max of 120 speeds with Bandwidth Boost, though the higher speed would cap receiving data to 40 Gbps. You can still stick with the MagSafe 3 charger in the box, but anybody with big power bricks with a USB-C end can expect to max out on charging speed.

Despite the big promises, you can’t support multiple 8K monitors with a MacBook Pro. The M4 Pro chip can do the full 3456 by 2234 resolution on the Pro’s display while supporting two external monitors at 6K and 60 Hz refresh rate. You can do a 4K up to 144 Hz through HDMI plus a 6K at 60 Hz, but you’ll lose out on your MacBook screen. If you want more, you need to spend extra dosh on the M4 Max with support for three 6K monitors through Thunderbolt and a 4K display through HDMI.

Even with the move to Thunderbolt 5, some upgrades seem mysteriously lacking. There’s still no WiFi 7 support; instead, it’s stuck with WiFi 6E. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s strange to see Apple taking the opposite tack when other laptops are jumping up to WiFi 7 long before Thunderbolt 5.

Apple MacBook Pro 16 2024 Review: Battery Life

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

Macs are known for their battery life, which is as true with the M4 models as with the M3, M2, and M1 chips. These laptops last for a long time. Apple promises 24 hours of video streaming and 17 hours of wireless web browsing on laptops with the M4 Pro. Our tests found the MacBook Pro 16 was close to those metrics, but of course, you won’t get 17-hour runtimes since you won’t just be using a $3,500 laptop to browse the internet.

In our battery tests, where we ran the laptop on a 24-hour YouTube video at the lowest possible brightness, the 16-inch MacBook Pro was at 61% after 12 hours. It only reached 50% at the 14-hour mark. As you might expect, it took another 12 hours to die completely. It has better longevity than its 14-inch counterpart with M4, which sat at 50% after 12 hours on the same tests.

Apple MacBook Pro 16 2024 Review: Verdict

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned Apple Intelligence once since the beginning of this review. Simply put, it does not change how you use your Mac. We’ve covered plenty of that already, and if you want more, read my MacBook Pro 14 review. If you don’t have an M-series Mac or the latest iPhones or iPads, you are not missing much as it currently stands. During our review, Apple pushed out developer betas for macOS Sequoia 15.2, offering the ChatGPT integration that works with the revised Siri. To sum it up, I found it didn’t add anything to the Mac experience. Sequoia is already a quality update, and I’d much rather use iPhone mirroring than plug prompts into ChatGPT through Siri.

The M4 Chip has a better 38 TOPS neural engine than the M3, M2, or M1 chips. Our Geekbench AI benchmarks show that the M4 scores are nearly 14,000 points higher than the score of the M3. However, you have to remember that the NPU doesn’t do much of the intensive AI tasks. The NPU is built for background AI. Anything that requires more juice is likely handled by Apple Intelligence’s much-hyped private cloud computing. If you’re an AI developer, you already know you care more about the qualities of the GPU.

Beyond all that, the MacBook Pro 16 with M4 Pro feels like a beast, thrumming with power, and you have to spend a dragon’s hoard to use it. Even if it sported strong-as-hell performance for that price, the kind of professional who needs that power would have to have a conversation between themselves and whatever gods they worship before dropping that amount of money on a singular machine. Just make sure you can live with this chassis. I know I could, but part of me is hoping for something better.