Apple MacBook Pro M4 review: the Pro for everyone

For a long time, the entry-level MacBook Pro has felt like a weird in-betweener, with the processor of a MacBook Air, the body of a MacBook Pro, and some features stripped away to keep it squarely in the middle.  

Last year’s 14-inch MacBook Pro was a step in the right direction, finally shedding the Touch Bar and upgrading the machine to be much closer to the other Pros. But it still followed the same formula: its processor was worse, its base RAM was lower, and it had one port fewer. It was a good machine, and a lot better than the M2 and M1 models, but it still didn’t feel like a full-throated Pro. 

With the M4, Apple finally has a base MacBook Pro that’s less of a parts-bin compromise and more of an actual Pro machine. It’s a laptop you can buy and not feel like you’re caught in between anything.

The M4 MacBook Pro fixes nearly every complaint we had with the M3 version. It starts at $1,599 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD — the same starting price as the M3 model, but with two more CPU cores, twice the RAM, and a third Thunderbolt port. That port is on the right side, just like on the “real” Pro models, so you can finally charge or connect to an external display on either side of the laptop. The Pro also benefits from Apple’s across-the-board bump to 16GB of memory. Apple Intelligence is mostly boring and useless right now, but I thank it for the gift of more RAM.

Those are already notable upgrades in what might have otherwise been just a chip bump year, but Apple also gave all three MacBook Pros new 12-megapixel webcams with Center Stage and its Desk View software feature, the option to add an anti-glare nano-texture display for $150, and the choice of a space black chassis. The M4 Pro also now supports two external displays with its lid open, one more than the M3 could.

These upgrades go a long way toward making the M4 MacBook Pro a meaningful upgrade over the MacBook Air for anyone dabbling in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, or similar creative apps. I’ve edited many high-resolution raw files in Lightroom Classic on my work-issued M1 MacBook Air — I do it any time I shoot pictures for The Verge — and I know firsthand how capable that little machine is. But I frequently bump against the constraints of its port selection and the performance ceiling of its aging, passively cooled processor. It’s why my personal computer is a Mac Mini with M2 Pro, which was Apple’s best value for years.

While editing the pictures you see here, the M4 MacBook Pro felt more spritely than my M2 Pro Mac Mini, and its speed in displaying and processing full-res 33-megapixel raws was a pleasant surprise. I know it’s not bogged down like the Mini is by nearly two years of use and all my personal app cruft, but it felt faster even working on my usual, bloated Lightroom catalog — which I copied over from my Mac Mini — with the images stored on the same external SSD I always work from. I did all of that while not plugged into power all day. The laptop ran for just over 12 hours of moderate-to-heavy usage and stayed quiet and cool to the touch the whole time. 

As for doing my edits on the nano-texture display, I know glossy screens have a slightly deeper contrast, but I love not worrying about glare. I’m not exclusively editing in a dark room with a hooded reference monitor, and I like the flexibility of working in places with less-than-ideal lighting conditions. The convenience of the nano-texture far outweighs any slight technical advantage of a glossy display. And at $150, it’s a worthwhile upgrade for visual pros. 

You won’t see the same performance in grueling workloads as you would if you spent a bit more to get an M4 Pro or a lot more for an M4 Max, but the standard M4 has some marked improvements over the M3. The M4 fared about 64 percent better than the M3 in Cinebench’s standard multicore test, and it maintained around a 41 percent delta when running a longer, sustained 30-minute loop of the same benchmark. It’s got two more cores than the M3 we tested, so it makes sense for the M4 to excel here, but its single-core scores in both Cinebench and Geekbench were also over 20 percent better. The machine was up to 25 percent faster in GPU benchmarks with the same number of GPU cores, too. 

Apple has a history of shipping disappointing webcams, even on its $1,599 Studio Display that costs as much as the M4 MacBook Pro and the just-released iPad Mini. But the MacBook Pro’s new 12MP camera has nice contrast even when I’m backlit by a window, and its Center Stage software that keeps you in frame works well enough without being overly aggressive on reframing. I can’t offer similar praise for Desk View, which uses some heavy cropping and software corrections to show a top-down view of your desk. It’s distorted and low-res, and there are myriad better ways to show and tell on a video call — including using your iPhone and Apple’s own Continuity Camera feature.

The cheapest M4 MacBook Pro costs $1,599 — $100 more than a 15-inch MacBook Air with an 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and equivalent memory and storage. (The Airs still start at 256GB; it costs $200 to upgrade to 512GB.) For the price, you get significantly better performance, more and faster Thunderbolt ports, a better-quality screen that’s higher resolution with up to a 120Hz refresh rate, two more speakers, and a better webcam. All these upgrades and quality-of-life improvements really add up — and for a lot of people, they’re worth the money.

Of course, if you want the anti-glare screen and 1TB of storage like our test unit, that puts you at $1,949, and now you’re just $50 away from the upgraded MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro processor, faster storage, more cores, 24GB of RAM, and Thunderbolt 5 ports — or $200 away if you want the nano-texture screen upgrade again. And then you’re squarely in Apple’s tornado of a pricing funnel, where it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few hundred dollars more on each incremental upgrade until you’re in reach of the next model up entirely, and then the process repeats. 

The biggest difference this time is that the entry-level MacBook Pro doesn’t really feel like a compromise. The base configuration has enough memory and storage to be actually worth considering, and it has all the ports and creature comforts of the higher-end Pros. Even the nano-texture screen upgrade feels worth it. For the first time in a long time, it actually feels like a Pro.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge