Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one

I'm always interested in what else is out there on the market and how people evaluate them, which did you get?

I'm personally looking at the middle tier M4 Pro 16" 14/20 with 48gb of ram to replace my 2019 13" i5 with 16gb and 256gb ssd.

It's somewhat frustrating, but although technically I can get by with my current machine, it's starting to feel foolish and needlessly frustrating to hang onto it longer, it's just so sluggish these days. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had got a more higher-end one 5 years ago. Windows remains as my old gaming PCs OS, idk that I'd want to contend with it daily for work or anything unless the software required it, but then I'd probably just upgrade the bits in my PC and stick with my older mac laptop for basic personal use.

Even though I did buy it, I can't say I can get past the cost of upgrading the various bits, but just decided that I should pick a reasonable option and not stress about it too hard, it'll be a nice change, I might even return it within the window if I feel sufficiently robbed. I couldn't wrap my head around the even more comical Max versions.

Maybe they're just trying to capture missing revenue from us never-iPhone people. It's the only part of the Apple ecosystem I participate in aside from an ancient iPad.

Yeah that is just insane.

I saw some videos from China [1] where people were upgrading the storage in the new M4 Mac Minis. The Mac Mini's SSD is on a removable pcb but it is raw nand flash as opposed to, say, typical m2 2230 SSDs that have a built-in controller. So they had to desolder it. But getting someone in China to desolder and upgrade the SSD to 2 TB is like 90% cheaper than buying it from Apple.

[1] http://xhslink.com/a/o0tLp4thqsDZ

It’s expensive and it’s good that other options are available, it’s not insanely expensive though, the people that need the upgrade often make 6 figure salaries and can afford the upgrade although they might not like the idea of paying it, I personally hate it but I know when I buy the machine will last me at least 5 years, which is good enough for me.

I want to buy a MacBook Pro but the problem I have fundamentally is the increasingly locked down experience they seem to be drifting towards, like the walled gardens on the phone. I feel like I am supporting an ecosystem not aligned to my needs. At the same time, Microsoft isn’t much better with user hostile dark patterns, ands, and things like Recall. It would be nice to have laptops that have the physical build quality and battery life of MacBook Pros but with a Windows 7-10 era OS without all this new anti customer stuff.

How much realistic battery life do you get?

Can you hear the fans spin in a typical week?

I ended up doing roughly the same, except 16", 48gb, 14/20 cpu, and with the matte option that I'm extremely on the fence about having done. In the store I couldn't tell a difference in picture quality even with a photographer pointing out differences and suggesting it wasn't worth it; I'm mainly concerned about damage to the screen from the keyboard and how necessary the cleaning cloth is.

Yeah, each cycle is generally meh over the last. I kept my M1 Air for 4 years, so it’s been quite a large difference. I got issued an M3 Pro for work, which is what made me realize there were some large gains to be had.

From earlier in the article it's apparent that "Air" is a typo and should be "Pro."

Same. For me, I took a program I wrote / am writing that’s extremely CPU and disk intensive, and compared the execution time. It’s 2x faster on an M4 Pro compared to an M1. That’s worth it to me.

It's a fair point, but Apple's also taken a lot of heat for comparing their new models to ancient ones rather than the previous one, so that they can show an even bigger performance jump.

It's very predictable at this point that nearly everyone has the same videos, it feels like me trying to not plagiarize Wikipedia in middle school; "I'll change a word here, rephrase a sentence there, done!". Also true in many other content categories, everyone uses the same source material, same review units, same benchmarks, often the same editing style. I'd say it's a negative, but I've been watching less and less of it since noticing the pattern.