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Apple on Wednesday wrapped up Macweek (well, Mac half-week) by introducing an updated MacBook Pro. Apple’s most premium laptop is catching up to is brethren with the addition of M4 chips. The Pro and Mini are the first two Macs getting the new chip. The Pro will also be the first to sport the just-announced M4 Max as an upgradeable option.
The new Pros will arrive with 14- and 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR displays that peak at 1,000 nits of brightness. Both sizes ship with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max options and a 12-megapixel webcam. The M4 Pro and Max models are getting their Thunderbolt 4 ports upgraded to Thunderbolt 5. Apple rates their battery life as a full 24 hours — the longest it’s claimed for any MacBook.
Image Credits:AppleApple Intelligence is, naturally, a big piece of the puzzle, as well. The first wave of features arrived with Monday’s macOS Sequoia 15.1 release, including writing tools, image cleanup, article summaries, and a typing input for the redesigned Siri experience. The forthcoming 15.2 release should deliver most of the remaining features promised by Apple at WWDC in June, including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, Image Wand, and ChatGPT integration.
Both models start with a 16GB base of memory. Ditto for the MacBook Air. Apple’s ultraportable is getting that upgrade for both the M2 and M3 models — though the systems remain otherwise unchanged from last year. The M2 version retains the same $999 base price as last year, as well.
The 14-inch starts at $1,599 for M4 and $1,999 for M4 Pro. The 16-inch starts at $2,499. Both are up for preorder Wednesday. They’re set to start shipping on November 8, along with the new iMac and Mac Mini announced earlier this week.
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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