I’ve been using a MacBook Pro for as long as I can remember, and it’s no secret that Apple Silicon has been an absolute gamechanger both in terms of portability and performance, but just when you thought the MacBook Pro was already perfect, Apple went and made a few small changes that absolutely improve the device once again.
For the most part, this is very much the same device as the M3 MacBook Pro, but there are a few key differences that not only elevate the MacBook Pro, but change the way it’s going to be used. The display on the MacBook Pro has always been the best display in a laptop, and now it’s even better.
The screen still has the Liquid Retina XDR display that can reach up to 1600 nits of peak brightness in HDR, but now it can also reach 1000 nits of sustained brightness when viewing SDR content which does go a long way. It’s the new Nano-texture display that blew me away the second I pulled it out of the box.
I’ve used the Nano-texture display on my Apple Studio Display for the last year or so in a fairly bright study, but my MacBook Pro is always with me, and I prefer to work on the sunshine, which was often at times impossible due to glare on the MacBook Pro display.
The new Nano-texture option hugely reduces reflections and glare, but still somehow maintains the fantastic contrast and vibrancy that we’ve come to love this screen for. It’s hugely affected how I use this laptop over the last week, where previously I’d sit away from windows or be less hesitant to take it to work outside, but now, it’s completely viewable no matter the situation.
I also shoot my MacBook screen quite a bit for content, and it was often hard as I required good lighting for the video, which would result in glare, but now it’s not the case at all, and whilst I do recognise that this is quite a unique use case, I think that creatives are going to love this new display as it is designed to be used out and about, even on planes I can see it making a huge difference. It’s a $230 additional fee but if you’re someone that has ever noticed glare on your laptop screen, I’d highly recommend it.
The other big improvement comes in the way of a new 12MP webcam. It’s probably the only thing that has let the MacBook Pro down over the last few years, but its’s hugely improved offering a much clearer picture and you can now also utilise Center Stage which keeps you in frame at all times. If you’re someone that needs to show your desk off on calls, there’s also the Desk View option which uses same kind of wizardry to show your desk whilst also keeping you in frame.
As far as other design differences, the base M4 MacBook Pro (the one tested for this review) now comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, where in previous years it had only come with three so that’s much appreciated. It’s also available in Space Black now which is still absolutely gorgeous. If you’re going for the M4 Pro or M4 Max, you get Thunderbolt 5 ports which offer transfer speeds of up to 120Gb/s. The rest of the port offering is still the same including a HDMI port, MagSafe as well as an SD card reader.
I had an M3 Max in my MacBook Pro last year, and whilst I loved the performance, I did notice a drop in battery life coming from base M2, but with the M4 chip it truly felt like the best of both worlds, without much of a drop at all in performance even when comparing rendering speeds for videos or gaming, the battery life is phenomenal at up to 24 hours on the base M4 model, and I felt like I got every bit of it literally going days without having to charge the laptop.
You also get a minimum of 16GB of memory, just like the rest of the M4 line which is important for Apple Intelligence and goes a long way when multitasking.
Whilst AAA gaming is only starting to hit its straps on Macs, there’s starting to be a solid little library there with big hitters such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows still on the way. I played quite a bit of Stray and Death Stranding utilising the M4 chip and both ran well using Apple’s MetalFX upscaling. I say it in every Apple review, but Apple Arcade is also fantastic and has some genuine banger games like Balatro+ on it, among many, many other well-known franchises and all of those titles run well here.
Despite my life revolving around tech, I’ve been a bit skeptical in AI improving my day to day life, but trust Apple to turn that around as my first taste of Apple Intelligence came with these M4 Macs over the last week, and I’m a massive fan.
The biggest one has been summaries which helps summaries bulk notifications among all of your apps but primarily Apple Messages, Mail and Facebook Messenger and as someone who receives dozens of notifications every minute across a number of group chats, email inboxes and Facebook groups, this is absolutely going to increase my mental wellbeing and productivity. It wasn’t always perfect, but I recognise that it’s still in beta and 98% of the time did an absolutely fantastic job at summarising notifications to either give me key information such as dates and times of events, or just give me the general gist to know whether a notification was worth opening.
Similarly, Mail will now bring emails that it thinks might be more important based on timeliness or relevance to the top of your inbox, but it was a few other areas that really improved my day to day. Photos is hugely improved through with search now letting you give it much more specific queries and there’s a new clean-up feature similar to Google’s Magic Eraser that lets you very seamlessly edit out unwanted parts of photos.
I’m a big Focus mode user when I’m in meetings or really need to get something done and I spent multiple days this week using a new Apple Intelligence Focus mode called Reduce Interruptions and it was an absolute game-changer. This uses Apple Intelligence to only delivery you the most important notifications again based on timelines or from a loved one that might need need a direct response or something that is deemed to be an emergency. Again, it wasn’t perfect, but it more often than not only let through notifications that were those that actually needed a response and can only get better with time.
Another big one that I think a lot of people will get use out of is Writing Tools which can be used within any app to re-write chunks of text in a more professional or casual tone, or summaries chunks of text into lists. I’m not somebody that has used AI tools in this way (even though there’s a bunch available), and I recongise that a lot of people get use out of these, and it’s great that they’re so accessible here.
Another improvement is Siri, and I wasn’t able to make use of the new ChatGPT integration yet, but I was able to use the new experience that is re-designed but also makes the conversation flow a lot more naturally, and it’s a big improvement, and I’m excited to see where Apple take it.
The other big change that has just launched is MacOS Sequoia that I hadn’t used on my existing Macs, and there’s a lot of new features to love there too. iPhone Mirroring was a big one that I had used a lot during this week, with it allowing me to post to TikTok and Instagram without having to pickup my phone and a quick drop and drag from my desktop to photos app on my virtual phone allowing me to easily bring content across.
Something that has also finally hit the Mac is Windows Tiling, which allows you to quickly snap windows to parts of your screen, which is something I’ve relied on other apps for in the past, but to have that built right into MacOS now is a huge improvement.
I really didn’t know how Apple would improve on the MacBook Pro this year, but they’ve somehow done it, with a number of minor changes coming together to once again breathe new life into this iconic laptop.