Forget The New MacBook Pro, Apple Has Something Much Better

Update October 20 with details on the rollout of Apple Intelligence.

Apple is preparing the next generation of MacBooks and will be making a big play ahead of the critical holiday buying season that your next computer should be a MacBook Pro. No doubt they’ll mention them being designed “from the ground up” to use Apple Intelligence. But the real question consumers need to think about is not which MacBook Pro to buy; it’s whether they should be considering a MacBook Pro in the first place.

Later this month, Apple is expected to launch three new powerful MacBooks—the M4-powered MacBook Pro, the M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and the M4 Max MacBook Pro—before they go on sale in the first week of November. These will introduce the new M4 Apple Silicon chipset to the Mac platform—although Apple made the curious decision to debut the chipset in May inside the iPad Pro.

The focus will stay on the MacBook Pro brand, and consumers will be presented with a classic Apple choice of three processors of differing performance.

There is an audience that needs a significant level of computing power in their life, and many in that audience need it in the portable form factor of a laptop. For everyone else, the best answer is the lighter and more affordable MacBook Air.

The sharp-eyed will note that Apple is not expected to launch an M4-powered MacBook Air at the upcoming event. Instead, those looking for a new laptop in the holiday season will be pushed towards the consumer-focused MacBook Pro running the base M4 chipset.

Update: Sunday October 20: Writing for the Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman highlights how far behind Apple is with its efforts in generative AI. September’s launch of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro handsets placed a huge focus on the company’s AI efforts gathered under the awkward backronymed title of Apple Intelligence. Last week saw the launch, by press release, of the latest iPad Mini and the upgraded chipset is designed to support Apple Intelligence.

Neither iOS or iPadOS have Apple intelligence available. Customers will have to wait until the week of Halloween before they can download any of the Apple Intelligence software. Even then, it will only be a small taste of Apple Intelligence as it is forced into a staged release.

When the MacBook Pro laptops launch, they will also lean heavily into AI, but as with the iPhone and iPad, Apple’s first pass at generative AI will not be available in full until March 2025. As Gurman points out, Apple is pushing AI to be the next great revolution. Yet, it is years behind the competition, “In fact, some at Apple believe that its generative AI technology — at least, so far — is more than two years behind the industry leaders.”

With Apple Intelligence not arriving in full until March, there’s no way to directly compare Apple’s system with that on Windows 11. Anyone buying a MacBook Pro will be deciding, in part, on the strength of what Apple may or may not release in March.

Anyone making this decision should be aware that the M4 Pro and M4 Max will be overpowered for the average consumer. And while the M4 MacBook Pro may look like the best choice, the actual laptop is a curiosity. Given that every MacBook Pro running a vanilla M-series chipset has been built around the MacBook Air chassis—essentially adding a fan to help cool the M-series chipset to bring a few more percentage points of power out of it—you have a laptop that is awkwardly stuck in the middle of the portfolio.

If you want the power, then you are naturally going to look further up the portfolio, and a few hundred dollars more will pay itself back over the life of the laptop.

If you are price-conscious, then the MacBook Air is where you want to be looking. In previous years, there was a definite feeling that a lower-priced laptop would be far less capable and anything more than light office work would not be possible on a company’s entry-level laptop.

That changed for Apple’s portfolio when it moved away from the x86-based Intel chipsets to its own Apple Silicon series of chips. The performance benefits in computing power, battery life, and thermal control redefined the MacBook to the point that even the M1 MacBook Air outperformed Windows laptops sold at twice the price.

The argument that you could not get performance at the base price no longer held true. That MacBook Air could comfortably hold its own against the best consumer-focused laptops from the competition. That’s arguably true today when you consider that Apple’s quixotic quest to reclaim the lead in generative AI for consumers will run comfortably on that four-year-old MacBook.

If you are one of the few who really need top-of-the-table power, then the M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro laptops are where the action is. But the advances made by Apple Silicon mean that even an entry-level Macbook Air will offer enough power and flexibility for pro-am content creators, developers, and artists while meeting the enterprise needs of IT Departments worldwide.

For those people, skip the upcoming MacBook Pro for the M4 MacBook Air. If your need is great and the purchase has to be now, I would seriously consider the current M3 MacBook Air.

Now read the latest problems facing the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro…