The M4 Macbook Pros Are Here! Everything That Is New And Notable! | Techmeme Ride Home Podcast
Apple has updated the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max chips, Thunderbolt 5, and 16GB+ of RAM, starting at $1,999 for 14" and $2,499 for 16", shipping November 8. Quoting The Verge:
The entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro is also getting a small design upgrade in the form of an extra USB-C / Thunderbolt 4 port on the right-hand side and a space black option to match its more premium brethren.
Like previous models, the M4 Pro-equipped laptops will start at $1,999 for the 14-inch. The 16-inch once again starts at $2,499, but it’s getting an upgrade to 24GB of RAM. The basic 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro still starts at $1,599, but that model now (mercifully) starts with 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB. The new MacBook Pros will be available on November 8th, with preorders available now.
Outside of chip bumps and RAM improvements, the 14- and 16-inch Pros with M4 Pro / Max chips are also the first Mac laptops with Thunderbolt 5 ports. All three MacBook Pros come with new 12-megapixel webcams that feature a desk view, and they can each be configured with a new nano-texture display capable of up to 1,000 nits of SDR brightness and 1,600 nits in HDR.
Those ancillary upgrades are nice, but the big changes are still the chips. Apple claims that the entire M4 generation of chips has “the world’s fastest CPU core” and “the industry’s best single-threaded performance.” Single-core performance has been a strong suit of Apple’s Mac chips since the M1 generation, and the M4 chips are promised to have “dramatically faster multithreaded performance.” The M4 Pro and Max also have faster GPU cores, with a ray-tracing engine that’s twice as fast. The neural engine is also 2x faster than the M3 generation for improved machine learning and AI workloads. ENDQUOTE
But that’s not all!
Apple says the MacBook Air with M2 or M3 chips will now come with 16GB of RAM as standard, up from 8GB, and leaves the pricing unchanged at $999+. Quoting Engadget:
You'll still have to live with a paltry 256GB of storage on all of the base MacBook Air systems, but hey, at least Apple is finally listening to our demands. We've long argued that it's worth bumping up to 16GB of RAM for most laptops. That's particularly true for Apple Silicon systems, which have memory directly built into their SoCs (system on a chip) and can't expand their RAM down the line.
You can thank AI as the main reason Apple and Microsoft (with Copilot+ AI PCs) are now pushing for 16GB of RAM. While Apple Intelligence requires 8GB of RAM to function, the company previously admitted it may not be enough to run the AI features in Xcode 16. As AI models grow and become more complex, their memory demands will only increase. More than ever, it pays to invest in as much RAM as you can up front.
You can order the refreshed MacBook Airs with 16GB of RAM online today, and they should be available in stores soon. ENDQUOTE
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