Apple MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max

There's a kind of inherent bias for me in relation to Apple's MacBooks. While we've seen great advances in both new CPUs from AMD and Intel, which are finally delivering both performance and efficiency on a level previously unimaginable, and of course Qualcomm's great Snapdragon CPUs that make ARM a legitimate alternative for any consumer, Apple has, in my opinion, been a quantum leap ahead since the introduction of Apple Sillicon.

This is, to some extent, subjective, and if you're of a different mindset then you can rejoice in the PC advances described in the above paragraph. But in terms of all the unique parameters a laptop has to deliver, and especially for those of us who need them for a multitude of versatile, flexible work tasks, the MacBook Pro series in particular is now better than it has ever been, and a technological marvel if you ask me.

The new MacBook Pro (we're specifically testing the 16-inch version with an M4 Max on board - but most of the praise applies to the entire line-up regardless of the innards) is based on a largely unchanged physical chassis, and in this particular case, that's a credit. While it could be argued that iPhone design is a bit stagnant and in need of a bold overhaul, Apple still garners praise from the very "power users" they appeal to after they chose to make the machine thicker, reintroduce crucial I/O and make the battery bigger.

This MacBook Pro is no different. You now have three Thunderbolt 5 ports supporting data transfers up to 120Gb/s, an SDXC card reader supporting the SD 4.0 standard, HDMI 2.1, WIFI 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, MagSafe 3 magnetic charging and a headphone jack (now missing from many competitors for some reason). There are still great studio microphones on board with beamforming that can pick up pretty decent sound, and arguably the best speakers in the industry. Our test unit, even with an M4 Max on board, delivered 20 hours of battery life with simple word processing, a workflow consisting of video streaming, browsing and writing. The new 12 megapixel Centre Stage webcam is also just more versatile and better than almost any other, and the Desk View is brilliant to say the least.

The new M4 Max ups the ante in a number of ways, and now consists of a 16-core CPU, a 40-core GPU, up to 128GB RAM and a memory bandwidth of 546GB/s. Just for fun, we tried out Apple's own tested pieces of software and compared them to the M3 Max. We're talking Redshift, MATLAB and Xcode code compiling, and actually saw about 20% higher results. We're talking rendering speed in Redshift, system dynamics in MATLAB and build performance in an Xcode-based project. Furthermore, we tested good old GeekBench 6, which is still optimised for Apple Sillicon, and here M4 Max beat Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K and Ryzen 9 9950X, both in single-core and multi-core performance. You pay for it, sure, but the results speak for themselves.

Of course, there has also been the traditional uplift in SSD speeds thanks to NAND. The limit is now 128GB, and with the M4 Max you can hit 66 streams of 4K ProRes streams simultaneously, or 15 8K Pro Res streams. There's also AV1 decoding built into the new media engine.

The point is, if your unique workflow supports Apple Sillicon, there's an almost inexhaustible amount of horsepower under the hood here, combined with shocking battery life for such a powerful machine, and creature comforts like speakers, I/O and build quality that few others have mastered, if any.

Although PC competitors are starting to offer displays in the same league, there's still a step up here too. This machine's 16.2" Liquid Retina Display runs at 3456x2234 and 120Hz, delivering approximately 1600 NITS in basal brightness and a contrast of 1,000,000:1. The new nano texture in the glass virtually eliminates glare, although at the cost of a bit of the aforementioned brightness, but the verdict is clear; this is way ahead of the competition in colour chemistry, depth, texture and versatility.

If you're willing to make the switch to English, macOS Sequioa offers some Apple Intelligence features. There are new text editing tools through both Summary and Concise, but also basic AI-based photo editing tools in Photos. There are summaries of conversations directly in your Mail, there's an improved Siri client. Is all this useful? It's incredibly difficult to answer, but improvements in Mail in particular seem to be quite transformative. I personally prefer AI as a summarising tool rather than for unique creations, but thankfully Apple seems to have understood that brief and is focusing on meaningful tools that don't get in the way.

Overall, this is another slam dunk, that's all. Should Apple eventually add some whole new functionality to their hardware framework? Yes, they should. But as Aragorn says, "but it is not this day". The latest MacBook is a brilliant professional tool, and the last few Pro generations will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the best laptop line-ups ever. That's how good they are.