In what may sound like preaching to the choir, my week-long escapade with Apple’s latest and greatest laptop is as revelatory as so unsurprising. The M4 MacBook Pro, in my books, is unequivocally the best laptop in the world. While this is not surprising, it is the un-Apple-like things that are part of the DNA of this notebook that push it further beyond the realm of normal Apple products.
To give more context to this, it is the fact that there are a couple of Macs from the last decade and a half that have held the mantle of the best laptop in the world, but none come as scrupulously worthy of the mantle as the latest 2024, M4 generation of the 14-inch Pro!
Legacy Of The MacBook
We have had the OG MacBook Air, which was a path breaker in its time, being unveiled flamboyantly with Jobsian swagger in an envelope. Then came the first few generations of the unibody design of the MacBook Pro, with the 2012 13-inch MacBook Pro remaining a fan favorite. The first generation of the Retina display MacBook Pro models married the panache of the Air with the power of the Pro coupled with that retina resolution that the iPhone 4 had popularized while also getting rid of the pesky disc drive much like the Air. I owned two generations of this notebook myself. I still know many a DJ who still trots this machine. Its MacBook Air cousin from 2013 is widely considered the greatest notebook of all time — with its design being almost timeless. And then came the M1 era, with the MacBook Air taking the crown again as the GOAT of laptops. A year down the line, some would note that the OG M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro models would have a solid shout at this haloed mantel.
But naah, I think, it’s quite clear for the first time in more than a decade the MacBook Pro becomes the best laptop in the world. The M4, borrows all the design improvements Apple made in late 2021. But it also gets the biggest leap in performance since its debut of Apple Silicon for the Mac with the M1 chip in 2020.
It also dispels the notion that Apple’s lead with Apple silicon is shortening. While Qualcomm grapples to get a slice of the PC market, Intel ducks for cover, making radical architectural changes to improve its battery efficiency and somehow not turn notebooks into an iron smelting tool, and AMD focuses on its gaming prowess with AI being the new buzzword, Apple just hums along with M4, widening the gap to the competition.
Iconic Design In Space Grey
Typically, Apple, the M4 MacBook Pro is a masterclass in iterative design. These Macs are familiar to a great level. They are easy to use, with wonderful keyboards that are a delight to type on, comfortable cushy keys that aren’t overtly loud, with a good key travel working in concert with the greatest trackpad in the world, which Apple has perfected to an art form. So working on this laptop isn’t a pleasure; it is a guilty pleasure. It invites you to work; you want to work more because it makes work fun and brings out the best pro that you can be.
And of course, you will be right when you have this gorgeous miniLED screen, which is pin-sharp, colour-accurate to the last pixel, and bright and vibrant to bring your favorite shows to life, married with a deceptively loud and clear audio system that’s possibly the best in a 14-inch laptop. These are skills that also help it be a perfect video editing or photo editing companion on the go. And oh, with the newfound abilities of games on the Mac platform, if you’re into some of the few games that are available on the platform, it is the best in the business.
It gets the adaptability that the MacBook Air never had, even when it gained the 15-inch form factor. It gets 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is excellent, coupled with an HDMI 2.0 port and a SD card reader. And how, there is MagSafe and a high-impedance audio jack for those studio monitoring headphones if you’re a music producer or a DJ or just an audiophile who wants to hook up his/her hi-fi headphones.
The latest Space Grey certainly makes this notebook feel more pro than it ever was in the previous iterations of the colour or with the silver, an old Apple classic that never grows old, but when you have Space Grey, you go crazy. Why? Because firstly it doesn’t seem as dirty as the silver colour can get, though it attracts more smudges than it, and it also just looks cool with the way the light bounces off the surface with a purplish hue radiating from the surface of the device. It also just fits better if you have opted for the model with the nano texture coating.
Sure, at 15.5mm and 1.55 grams this isn’t winning any awards for being the slimmest or the lightest notebook in its weight class. But by no means it is obese; I’d wager it is meticulously balanced. Though one has to admit the latest generation of Lunar Lake notebooks are getting kind of anorectic.
Powerhouse M4 Chip Is A Screamer
Performance isn’t going to be an issue for 99 percent of the people who use a M4 MacBook Pro. It is just exceptionally good at what it does, as the M4 is now a 10-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, which themselves are pretty rapid. Then there is a 10-core GPU that also now gets 2x faster ray tracing than the M3 generation and a 16-core neural engine, which is trotting 38 trillion operations per second. There is 120GB/s of memory bandwidth. These are crazy figures for anyone. There is a hardware-accelerated media engine as well, which will do creative tasks like video editing, music production, or photo editing like the back of its hand.
Of course, if you want more, there is plenty more to get — the M4 Pro comes in 12 and 14 CPU flavors with either a 16-core or 20-core GPU, and then there is the M4 Max, which comes in 14-core and 16-core options and a GPU that can have up to 40 cores. Apple has literally thrown in the kitchen sink and how.
My test machine is a base model M4 16GB RAM model but with 1TB drive which I believe is the ideal setup for most people. This setup which which will set you back by around Rs 189,900 is perhaps the ideal setup for most people. It is a machine which will last most people for more than 3 to 4 years.
I edited a lot of videos that I shot with the new iPhone 16 on FCP 11. Yes, these were 4K videos shot in ProRes at 60 frames per second. The MacBook Pro M4 didn’t even break a sweat. These were multi-camera setups; some were podcasts, some were effects-heavy reels, and everything was handled seamlessly. I never heard the fan spin up, and even if it did, things were quite discreet. I also exported a lot of footage from the DJI Pocket 3, which was handled with similar alacrity.
One of the more interesting things I managed to do, which I doubt other reviewers have tried, is editing spatial video. Since I am an Apple Vision Pro owner, I shot some footage from my iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 Pro Max, and Apple Vision Pro and took advantage of the new updates on FCP 11, which has been optimized for the M4 processor. I was able to create some really nice content to watch on the Vision Pro.
Of course, if you’re going to be doing heavier-duty video editing, say from a DSLR camera like the Sony Alpha A7, then I can totally imagine the fans spinning up a bit, but this laptop will easily handle those edits as well. Just to give some context—the M4 chip is more powerful than an M1 Max-based MacBook Pro from 3 years ago. In fact, it is pretty close to a base version of an M2 Max early 2023 MacBook Pro. That’s the level of performance boost Apple has achieved. That’s like going from a naturally aspirated V12 engine on a Ferrari to a turbocharged hybrid V12 engine, which now has instant torque and a higher and more linear performance curve. The neural engine is nicely utilized for features like Magnetic Mask and even for transcriptions of captions.
In a nutshell even the base level 16GB M4 MacBook Pro is a dream video editing machine. It is absolutely bonkers at its base level configuration so I cannot imagine how good the M4 Pro and M4 Max variants are going to be. Those machines perhaps are going to be more useful for folks that are actually dabbling with 8K content for Hollywood productions. I really don’t see anything above a M4 MacBook Pro to be something for a content creator who is making 4K video on YouTube or Instagram reels.
For musicians, this becomes an even better device. However, I’d suggest that musicians consider at least the 32GB RAM variant from a long-term perspective. The reason is that if you’re a producer using numerous tracks for stems in software like Ableton Live or Logic Pro with MainStage, the base 16GB model may become a bottleneck. This is a very powerful solution for most musicians, especially live electronic music producers who can perform live shows with the addition of an audio interface from a company like Focusrite or Universal Audio, while also using the same notebook to produce tracks.
It Can Game Too
Now let’s talk gaming. Everyone knows gaming is the Mac’s Achilles' heel! But since Apple silicon has come out, Apple hasn’t only doubled down on the capabilities of the GPU with dynamic mesh shading and ray tracing, which is now 2x faster than the M3 generation on the M4, but also made it available even on the iPhone starting with the A17 Pro chip and the iPad models, including the iPad mini and the latest iPad Pro. It has also released the Game Porting tool, which enables game developers to port their triple-A titles that are available on consoles or Windows PCs. So this is changing -- we have games like Death Stranding, Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and games like Control and Assassin’s Creed Shadows coming soon. And I can tell you, though older, Death Stranding is playing beautifully well on this M4 Mac, and mind you, better than a PS5. So that’s the level we’re talking about. Similarly, games like Resident Evil Village also look incredible on this Mac.
Apple has certainly addressed the Mac’s inherent weakness. From a hardware point of view, Apple has largely solved the issue after its feud with Nvidia meant that for the longest time, Intel-powered Macs were saddled with AMD GPUs. Apple’s in-house GPU is a phenomenon, and there are tools for game developers who can now scale across Apple’s galaxy of hardware products, including the iPhone, which now opens up a massive market for them, bigger than even Windows. But the issue is not fully solved. For example, a popular game like FC25 is not available on the Mac, though Hideo Kojima has said all of his new games will come to Apple’s platforms. But in reality, this is a journey, and it may take up to five years for the Mac to come close to the PC in the gaming space or perhaps even a decade.
Best Battery Life On A Notebook
Finally, the battery life on the MacBook Pro is incredible. In my tests I was getting more than a day’s charge on a single charge and this is with heavy usage, watching movies, editing video, writing articles, on device AI processing for Apple Intelligence -- with features like writing tools being used rabidly. And mind you I did this on a system on which I was running macOS Sonoma Developer Beta 2. This is the best battery life on a laptop in 2024. This is the new battery king, though it should be noted that the battery life will be slightly lower on the M4 Pro and M4 Max variants as they guzzle more gas.
Verdict
And when I look at this laptop holistically, it becomes the best laptop in the world. There are no two ways about it. At its price point, it is unrivaled. It blends power, premium design, Apple’s excellent software support, and adaptability for almost any type of use case. The only place where one can criticize the MacBook Pro is the lack of a touchscreen and the fact that macOS as a platform is not conducive to gaming, though gaming has also greatly improved.
