Apple Unleashes Powerhouse Upgrades: Meet the New MacBook Pro and Turbocharged M4 Max Chip

Zhitong Finance APP learned that on Wednesday, Apple (AAPL.US) once again expanded its Mac series and released the latest MacBook Pro laptop and high-end M4 Max chip. Pre-orders will open in the Chinese market at 9 a.m. on November 1, and sales will begin on November 8. The news comes on the heels of Apple’s announcement of new Mac mini desktops and M4 Pro chips on Tuesday, while the company also unveiled a new version of its iMac desktop on Monday.

Apple is fully updating its Mac product line ahead of the holiday shopping season, and global PC sales are beginning to slowly recover from a decline after experiencing a sales surge in the early days of the new coronavirus epidemic. In 2024, the sales performance of Apple’s Mac series will be outstanding. Revenue in the first three quarters of this year reached US$22.2 billion, a year-on-year increase, rising steadily from US$21.7 billion in 2023.

The new Mac lineup also comes with the debut of Apple’s first batch of Apple Intelligence features, available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, including new features such as notification summaries, text summarization, rewriting tools, and photo editing options. The MacBook Pro is designed for users who need to handle high-load tasks such as video editing and 3D modeling, and Apple promises that its latest product line can handle these needs well.

The newly released Pro series includes 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. The 14-inch version starts at US$1,599 (RMB 16,999) and is equipped with an M4 chip and 16GB of memory. The 16-inch version starts at $2,499 (RMB 19,999) and is equipped with an M4 Pro chip and 24GB of memory.

Apple first released the M4 chip in April this year and used it in the latest iPad Pro. On Tuesday, Apple launched a more powerful M4 Pro chip, which debuted on the Mac mini. M4 Pro is equipped with a 14-core central processing unit (CPU), a 20-core graphics processing unit (GPU), and a 16-core neural engine to handle AI tasks. Apple says that the M4 Pro’s CPU is 1.8 times faster than the M4, and its GPU speed is increased to 2.2 times. Overall, the performance of the 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M4 Pro chip is three times higher than that of the M1 Pro chip version, and the M4 Max further breaks through the performance boundaries.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M4 Max chip has memory expandable to 128GB, has a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU and 16-core neural engine, and has extremely powerful performance. According to Apple, this MacBook Pro is 3.5 times faster than the 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M1 Max chip.

Despite the massive performance improvements, Apple says the MacBook Pro still has 24 hours of battery life.

In addition to the performance improvements, Apple also announced that both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro now come with three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. If users choose the M4 Pro or M4 Max, these ports will be upgraded to Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 is a version of the USB-C interface that allows data transfer speeds of up to 120Gbps per second, which means multiple high-resolution displays can be connected simultaneously and enable faster data transfers.

The new MacBook Pro is also equipped with an upgraded 12-megapixel Center Stage camera that automatically tracks the user’s movements to ensure that every participant remains in the frame during a video call. In addition, the display also adds a nano-texture coating option to reduce glare in bright environments.

In addition to the upgrade of the Pro series and M4 chips, Apple also announced that the base memory of the M2 and M3-powered MacBook Air will be increased from 8GB to 16GB. The move is likely to enhance the performance of M2 and M3-powered Mac devices when running the Apple Intelligence platform and its native AI capabilities.