There's a new MacBook Pro in town, and Apple is touting some of the most promising features and specs I've seen from the company. Sure, the Thunderbolt 5 port on the M4 Pro and M4 Max models will appeal to creatives and professionals who desire faster, more powerful data transferring, and the peak SDR brightness of 1,000 nits will satisfy any digital nomad. Still, I'm most attracted to a boringly awesome upgrade: battery life.
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With the new M4 MacBook Pro, Apple is advertising up to 24 hours of battery life, a first for any Mac. Both the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max get the full-day rating, while the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max falls just short at 22 hours.
Still, that's a marginal upgrade compared to the previous M3 MacBook generation, which started at 18 hours of battery life. A few more hours of usage on the M4 variants can mean the difference between successfully uploading a video project and just missing a deadline. It's also simply greater endurance for daily tasks, especially if you're on the go with no outlet nearby. I could definitely benefit from the extra juice when working at trade shows or flying.
Apple chalks up the battery improvements to its more efficient M4 processor, which yields greater performance per watt. With AI embedded into more workflows, such as photo editing and coding, "each chip includes increased memory bandwidth, so large language models and other large projects run smoothly and on device," Apple says in its press release.
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Beyond the battery rating, the base M4 MacBook Pro also gets a subtle but practical charging feature: a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port on the right side of the laptop. This gives the device more flexibility whether you're charging it from an outlet or connecting to an external monitor or accessory.
The new M4 MacBook Pro models start at $1,599, the same price as last year's M3 series, which makes the new upgrades that much easier to appreciate.