Apple's new MacBook Pro M4: 16GB RAM for base 14-inch and no price hike, 24-hour battery life

The new MacBook Pro models can have the M4, M4 Pro or M4 Max, and there's a small (optional) upgrade for the display - and a claimed 24-hour battery life.

Apple's new MacBook Pro M4: 16GB RAM for base 14-inch and no price hike, 24-hour battery life
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TL;DR: Apple unveiled new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring the M4 chip, including the M4 Max, with a minimum of 16GB RAM for the 14-inch model. The base model maintains its $1,599 price.

Apple just took off the wraps from new MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models with the M4 chip, which can pack an even faster SoC than we've already seen - namely the M4 Max - plus a move has been made to a minimum of 16GB of RAM with the 14-inch flavor of the laptop (finally).

The new MacBook Pro is the only Mac to offer the M4 Max as a supercharged option for a SoC (Image Credit: Apple)

The new MacBook Pro is the only Mac to offer the M4 Max as a supercharged option for a SoC (Image Credit: Apple)

All of this was rumored - indeed Apple itself accidentally leaked the M4 Max yesterday, via its own website - and the 16GB of Unified Memory for the entry-level MacBook Pro 14-inch with M4 is, of course, very welcome.

The good news is that there's no price hike with the move to 16GB on that base MacBook Pro 14-inch, with Apple maintaining the MSRP at $1,599.

The laptops come with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, though you get a trio of Thunderbolt 5 connectors with the MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch that have the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips.

The Liquid Retina XDR display offers an increase to 1,000 nits of brightness (for SDR, HDR remains at 1,600 nits) and a nano-texture display option (for an additional $150) which reduces glare (as seen with the new iMac 24-inch M4).

Apple is claiming up to 24 hours battery life with the new MacBook Pro M4. That will vary according to configuration, of course, and usage - and we'll be interested to see how third-party testing pans out here.

There's also a new 12MP Center Stage camera, and the MacBook Pro 14-inch is now available in space black.

A new 12MP webcam is on board (Image Credit: Apple)

A new 12MP webcam is on board (Image Credit: Apple)

CPU specs

The entry-level MacBook Pro 14-inch features a 10-core M4 CPU which has four performance cores and six efficiency cores, backed up with a 10-core GPU, and as mentioned a base allocation of 16GB of RAM (with 120GB/s of memory bandwidth).

Apple tells us this M4-toting laptop is up to 1.8x faster for tasks like photo editing compared to the MacBook Pro 13-inch with M1, and up to 3.4x faster for rendering in Blender. The NPU is over 3x more powerful than the effort in the M1 chip.

If you're going for an M4 Pro model, this chip is a 14-core CPU (with 10 performance and four efficiency cores), with up to a 20-core GPU. For the M4 Max, Apple has gone for up to a 16-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU, and the promise of providing (up to) 3.5x the performance of the M1 Max.

Both MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models are up for pre-order now, and they go on sale starting from November 8, the same as Apple's other just-revealed Mac M4 machines.

Those include the iMac M4, unveiled on Monday, and the Mac mini M4 which was shown off yesterday.

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NEWS SOURCE:apple.com

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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