MacBook Pro 16 (2024, M4 Pro) review: The first Mac worth upgrading to from an M1-series chip

Apple made a big change a few years ago when it came to MacBooks: Apple Silicon. The company transitioned to its own Arm-based SoCs to power its MacBooks, and later, its desktop options in the form of the Mac Mini and the iMac. This started with the Apple Silicon M1 series, and has continued over the years with the M2, the M3, and now, the M4. I purchased an M1 Pro MacBook Pro shortly after it launched, and I recently made the jump to an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

As for why I made the jump, the reason was simple: I’m a developer. I do a lot of testing, run a lot of containers and virtual machines, and just in general, I’m a power-user through and through. For most people the upgrade from M1 to M4 isn’t necessary, but with previous generations, I still couldn’t justify the leap. Now, though, I finally can. The M4 Pro represents a big enough jump over the original M1 Pro that it makes sense for me to upgrade, and the other improvements make it worthwhile, too.

Keep in mind that there are very few criticisms out there of Apple’s MacBooks. They’re powerful with great speakers, a great quality screen, a good webcam, and absolutely jaw-droppingly-good battery life. This has been the case since the first Apple Silicon Macs, and that’s still the case today. I put my MacBook Pro through the ringer just to prove it, and the results are impressive. If you’re still using an Intel-based MacBook, now is certainly the time to make the jump, and if you’re on an M1-series chip, it might still be.

About this review: I purchased the MacBook Pro 16 (2024, 14-core M4 Pro) on January 8th, 2025. I received it January 13th, 2025, and I have been using it as my personal machine since. The company did not have input in this article.

MacBook Pro 14-inch (M4 Max, 2024)

Pros & Cons

• Fantastic all-round laptop
• Great performance
• All-day battery life
• Fantastic speakers

• Very expensive
• Upsells are needed to make it usable in a lot of cases

Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024, M4 Pro): Price, availability, and specifications

This particular MacBook Pro is a powerful machine (though it’s not the best), and that power comes with a pretty high price tag. The 14-inch model with a 12-core CPU starts at $1,999, which gets you 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The 14-core CPU model (the one we’re focusing on in this review) starts at $2,399, which gets you 24GB of RAM but starts with 1TB of storage instead of 512GB. Upgrading to 48GB of RAM costs an additional $400 for both models.

With Apple, there’s a lot of money in the upsells. 512GB of storage is simply not a lot, and jumping to 1TB will cost you $200. For the 14-core model, jumping to 2TB costs $400. It’s a lot of money, but those initial “starting at” values appear to be deceptively affordable until you realise that 512GB of storage isn’t a lot. 24GB of RAM is certainly better than what Apple used to start with, at the very least.

If you want to get a 16-inch model, there’s only a 14-core option available, and that starts at $2,499. To upgrade to 48GB of RAM, it starts at $2,899, and both of those options default to 512GB of storage out of the box. An additional terabyte is $200, meaning for a configuration with an actually-usable amount of storage, you’ll be looking at $2,699 at a minimum. Plus, if you’re doing anything RAM intensive, you might want to consider upgrading to 48GB of RAM, which bumps that to $3,199.

No doubt, these are very, very high prices. However, the cost might be worth it if it’s going to be your main work machine for years to come. All of these models are available worldwide anywhere that sells Apple products, but you’ll get the most configuration options directly from Apple.

Design and hardware

Apple nails it again

Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops haven’t really changed over the past few years, retaining the same design and ports as the very first M1 MacBooks from a few years ago. The 16-inch model is somewhat hefty, weighing 4.7 pounds and measuring 14 inches wide and just shy of 10 inches tall. For power-users who work on the go, the 16-inch model might be worth it, which is why I picked it up. While a 14-inch model would be nice and considerably easier to bring around, the extra screen real-estate was a must for me.

Like other models, Apple’s trackpad is still one of the best around, and the speakers are some of the best you’ll find on any portable device, especially a laptop. It’s very well-built, with a complete aluminium body that looks clean. While I’m worried about aluminum discoloration over time, it admittedly didn’t affect my 2020 MacBook Pro, so I’ve no reason to believe that will be the case here. The keyboard is nice, but one of the weaker parts of any Apple product I’ve found. It’s certainly better than the Butterfly keys they used on Intel-based Macs, but it’s not the best out there. Then again, I’m used to keyboards like the Glorious GMMK 3 Pro HE and the Wooting 80HE, so it was always going to be a downgrade when compared to those.

The port options are fantastic, and Apple did something great with the 14-inch model this year when it comes to ports, too. With the 16-inch model, you get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, and the MagSafe power connector. The 14-inch model now matches this, whereas previous generations typically lost out on a Thunderbolt port in the smaller model. The only downside is that the 14-inch model still sticks to Thunderbolt 4 rather than Thunderbolt 5, which is a confusing ommission, even if it doesn’t make any practical different right now.

As for display capabilities, the MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro SoC supports up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, or one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI. It also supports one external display supported at 8K resolution at 60Hz or one external display at 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI.

Display

There’s another big change with Apple’s 2024 MacBooks, and that’s the inclusion of a Nano Texture display option. This is a surprisingly “cheap” upgrade (relative to Apple’s other upgrades) that I highly recommend you get if you use your MacBook Pro outside a lot. It’s a $150 upgrade that makes your display much easier to see when light is directly shone on it, and it does make a massive diference. Plus, you get the Apple Polishing Cloth with it when you make this upgrade, and jokes aside, it actually is a very high-quality polishing cloth made for Apple’s nano-texture displays, and is not a general purpose microfiber cloth.

This upgrade has been a game-changer when working near windows or taking train journeys, as it does a great job at diffusing light sources that hit the screen. As a result, while it’s obviously glass and will reflect lights back, it breaks up the light so that the legibility of the screen isn’t hampered. I genuinely can’t rave about it enough, as it’s made working outside and near light sources completely viable in a way that I didn’t know it could be before. If you work in the dark a lot or don’t find yourself working near light sources, though, then you don’t need this upgrade.

With that out of the way, this particular MacBook has a 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, which is just Apple-speak for a Mini LED panel. While I don’t have the tools to measure color accuracy, it’s a fantastic looking panel that I’ve been using for photo editing. It has a 3456 x 2234 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 1,600 nits peak brightness with up to 1,000 nits sustained brightness in normal settings. Apple’s displays are widely regarded as being well-calibrated, so while I can’t measure that myself, rest assured that you’re getting a very high-quality display.

Surprisingly enough, I’ve actually come to… “like” might be a strong word, but tolerate the notch. I don’t really ever think about it, and I like that the display is edge to edge. I remember companies like Huawei tried to get around having a notch by putting the webcam in the keyboard, but this led to having a nose camera instead of a proper webcam. It’s a fine compromise, and I can’t remember a time where I felt that the notch was actually in my way.

Performance and efficiency

This is where things get really interesting, as Apple’s MacBook Pro devices are revered not just for their battery life but performance still. Despite sipping on power as you use it, there’s no sign of slowdown or struggle in every day-to-day task that I’ve put this machine through. Even with the heavier stuff, like running virtual machines, containers, and more, I haven’t had any issues. The battery lasts me a full day easily, and even when running my tests and pushing this machine to its limit, I still saw battery life projections that would see me get three hours of usage out of it without any problem.

On to the actual testing, I built a Python script to read from Apple’s Powermetrics, which is a built-in software that can provide power-related information when it comes to the CPU, GPU, and Apple Neural Engine. I then ran a CPU stress test that pushed all cores to 100% followed by a GPU stress test that pushed the GPU to 100%. The CPU drew 30W of power when pushed to its limit, and the GPU drew 40W of power when pushed to its limit.

However, things turn interesting when both are pushed at the same time. While I saw a peak combined usage of just over 70W (matching the full power of both the CPU and the GPU), it quickly dropped off as the laptop got very hot and things began to thermal throttle. So far as I’ve used this laptop for all kinds of things, I have never experienced the heat generated by the CPU test, let alone the heat generated by the CPU and GPU test.

Apple’s M4 Pro is in a class of its own, and there are a few reasons for that. The company’s Unified Memory Architecture helps here too, where the CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD are connected and can access eachother very quickly. However, the chip itself is manufactured on TSMC’s N3E process, making it one of the first to use TSMC’s 3nm technology and boosting efficiency further. It’s an efficiency beast.

In normal day-to-day usage, the power usage is significantly less than either of those values. In using my laptop regularly for browsing, listening to music, Discord, and YouTube, the complete power basically never exceeded 10W of power draw. This is an incredible level of efficiency, and I’m just using the automatic power mode. I’m not using low power or high power, I’m just letting the software dictate that for me. The battery life outlives my workday significantly, with this laptop capable of lasting 8 hours on a single charge and still leaving me with upwards of 40% left at times.

With Cyberpunk: 2077‘s imminent macOS release and software like Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, it’s clear that Apple likes the idea of macOS at least being a platform usable by gamers. This performance is fantastic, the efficiency even more so, and there’s never been a better time for game developers to at least try and port their games to Mac if they want to serve that market, too.

You’ve seen all the benchmarks by now, but the actual power usage over time and what this laptop is capable of is next-level.

Is macOS good enough for power users?

It’s all about what you make of it

I often see people disparage macOS as an operating system aimed at simplying a computer experience, but I don’t think that’s quite the full picture. On the surface, Apple undeniably does simplify the experience in a typical Apple fashion, but the company is well aware that a huge swathe of developers love Macs. So much so, that many, many tech companies will actually give their employees Macs to develop on. If they weren’t good for power users, that wouldn’t be the case.

The truth is that Apple manages to combine that simplified experience with the right tools for people who want their laptop to be more than just an expensive Chromebook. There are plenty of Terminal alternatives out there for example (I use Ghostty), you can modify parts of the system if you want to, and you can even install kernel extensions to add additonal functionality. For example, I have macFUSE to facilitate VeraCrypt’s drive mounts.

Are you getting all of the control that you would get with a Linux distribution like Arch? Obviously not, but that’s not needed (or even wanted) by most people. I say most, because the people who do want that will want to look elsewhere. However, the Mac experience overall is a well-polished, easy-to-use platform with options for power-users to tune it to their heart’s content, with many options for tweaking and modifications if you care for that kind of thing. It’s a great middle-of-the-road option, and one that suits me incredibly well.

When it comes to Apple Intelligence, to be honest, I find it a bit of a hindrance. While some of those features aren’t available in Europe, I find that the writing tools and other summary options are not something I ever feel the need to use. I don’t look at them in any way, though for Siri users, the option to type to Siri is a welcome change, especially when it can then ask ChatGPT questions for you if it can’t give you the answer.

As well, for those who may be afraid of making their first foray into Apple’s so-called “walled garden”, the MacBook Pro is one of the least intrinsic parts of the entire Apple ecosystem. I use it alongside my Android phone and my Windows PC, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on any features or feel that I have a debilitated experience because I don’t use other Apple products. The MacBook Pro stands on its own two feet, and there’s no need to buy into other Apple products if you haven’t already.

Should you buy the MacBook Pro 16 (2024, M4 Pro)?

You should buy the MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro if:

• You’re a content creator or developer and need additional processing power
• You want a computer that’s capable of doing everything you need
• You want incredible battery life

You should not buy the MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro if:

• You have a MacBook with an M2 chip or newer
• If you don’t have the budget for it

The MacBook Pro 16 with the M4 Pro is the best laptop I’ve ever used, and that’s just a fact. I upgraded from the M1 Pro MacBook that I had because I was beginning to hit roadblocks with some of the intensive tasks I put it through, as back then, I didn’t develop anywhere near as much as I do now. I’m no longer hitting any roadblocks, I’m not struggling for performance, I’m not struggling for RAM, and my battery life is as good as it ever was.

This is a fantastically over-the-top laptop for practically anyone in that most people don’t need this kind of power, but it’s everything about this laptop that makes it great. The screen, the speakers, the port options, the battery life, there’s something here for everyone that isn’t just performance. You could buy this laptop for basic web browsing and Netflix usage and be more than happy with it. Should you? Probably not, because that’s a lot of money, but the point is that this laptop will excel even in those basic use cases.

If you just want a fantastic laptop without needing to worry, then this is honestly it. It’s a lot (a lot) of money, but if you’re a power-user especially who plans to put it through its paces, then there are far few alternatives that will be this good.