Apple M4 MacBook Pro Review: Faster Than Ever, and the Matte Option Wows

Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M4 Pro, late 2024)

Pros

• Fast
• Excellent screen
• Improved webcam
• Same solid design as previous model

Cons

• Heavy
• Big drop in performance in low-power mode
• Prone to fingerprint smudges

Apple’s M4 models of its MacBook Pro 14- and 16-inch laptops are a lot more of the same, though with some notable exceptions. They both come with much improved webcams, and the M4 line of chips delivers better performance than their M3 equivalents and sometimes better than the class above. The MacBook Pro 14 gets back the third Thunderbolt connector that had disappeared from the 2023 model. You can opt to pay $150 more for the excellent, relatively nonreflective nano-texture coating on both sizes. And if you need it, you can bump up to the M4 Pro or M4 Max processor to get Thunderbolt 5.

Watch this: M4 MacBook Pro: High Power, Apple Intelligence and a Winning Display

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I didn’t have enough time to complete my testing, so these are unrated for the moment. I still have to run the battery tests and to perform some tests on older Apple and Windows systems for comparisons and will complete my reviews then. That said, I don’t expect the battery life to be worse than last year’s models, which already had terrific endurance. 

If you work outside at all or indoors with direct sunlight falling on your screen, it’s definitely worth the $150 add-on for the nano-texture option. The laptops even come with the $19 polishing cloth, though you really don’t need it. 

The base $1,599 MacBook 14 is a better value than the base (but more expensive) M3 model was, and unless you need the extra bandwidth of Thunderbolt 5 (for faster data and support for more external monitors) opting for the Pro or Max processors may not be worth it. For the 16-inch, I think more memory might be worth the money, since that’s useful for creative work, and the M4 Max might be worth it for the increased number of GPU cores. But I won’t know until I get a chance to test a system with an M4 Max inside.

Performance

Because the screen on the MacBook Pro 16 is identical to the previous model, I haven’t yet retested it either. I did test the screen on the MacBook 14 to see if the nano-texture coating affected its accuracy, white point(s) or brightness compared to last year’s and the answer is barely; for instance, SDR brightness peaked at 597 nits rather than over 600 nits. The screen controller can now push brightness to 1,000 in SDR, but it only adjusts automatically; there’s no way to control it, and it will only peak to that level in bright sunlight, which makes it difficult to test. And accuracy for the various reference profiles hasn’t changed. 

The webcam is definitely better than the FaceTime HD camera, though, even if you ignore all of Apple’s computational wizardry. Because it’s higher resolution, you can zoom in or out to include other people with less degradation; the exposure and color balance look the same as all Apple cameras. The new feature in MacOS 15 for the Center Stage webcams, Desk View, is unimpressive and kludgy; if you really want to show a view of your desk or hands without jumping through hoops, get a webcam that can tilt or sit on a tripod.

As for the internals, the M4 chips typically have more CPU and GPU cores than their M3 equivalents (with some exceptions), and those combined with the neural engine run faster, so it’s unsurprising that they perform better overall. For instance, the 14-core CPU of the M4 Pro performs essentially the same as the 16C M3 Max. If you wander back to the M2 generation, the gap widens significantly. Does that mean you need to upgrade? Only if what you’ve got now isn’t fast enough.

The M4 chips all have the same Gen 2, 16-core neural cluster, which performs identically across the line. That also performs significantly better than the first generation on the types of early on-device Apple Intelligence features did (just like with Windows), including removing backgrounds in video calls, summarizing stuff, drafting text, object recognition, translation, upscaling and so on. But it’s not clear yet where to draw the line as to what’s good vs. bad.

In general, as before, performance drops significantly across the board when you drop to low-power mode to (presumably) extend battery time. It will have to wait for my testing to see if it increases battery time enough to be worth it.

As for gaming, Apple talks about it a lot, but there’s still no there there. Only a fraction of the universe of games that you’d want to run on a computer run natively on the Mac. Many of the games it uses emulation for are better played on mobile. And many of the “hot” games Apple likes to talk about are either five years old (or more), or have been “on the way” for a while. And when Apple talks about them, frame rates of 60fps (with upscaling) seem to be the reach goal. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t game on a MacBook. In one of the few recent, natively running games, Hades 2, the MacBook 14, with its low GPU core count, consistently hit 120fps for me. It might have been able to hit higher, but the display only supports either fixed refresh rates up to 60Hz or variable rate ProMotion, which caps it at 120Hz. In order to play at higher frame rates, you have to connect to an external monitor — which is also on my list of things to test before finalizing my reviews.

The latest MacBook Pros remain good for what they’ve always been good for, but the last generation are still available and if you can find them for less, you may be happier saving the money than paying for performance you don’t necessarily need — especially since rumors say there will possibly be a design overhaul coming in 2026.