Transcription
Okay, so I've been using the M4 and the M4 Pro MacBook Pro for about a week now, and I think that a lot of people are missing the point of these machines this time around. So in this video, I want to help you determine whether M4 or M4 Pro is right for you.
First off, the unboxing is exactly what you'd expect from Apple, aside from the fact that you now get a polishing cloth if you order the Nano texture display, which is an extra $150. So, I have the base model for both of these, but I only got the Nano texture display on the M4 MacBook Pro, so that brings the price of that up to $1750, whereas the base M4 Pro is $2,000. If you compare base model to base model, there's a $400 difference between these two.
Now, before we get into the testing, let's take a quick look at the design and the specs of these machines. First off, you can see I have a space black and a silver option. You can now get space black on the base model chip this time around; last year, you had to get the pro chip to get this new space black color. You also get the same amount of USB-C ports this time around because last year, if you remember, the M3 Pro had an additional USB-C port on the side. But now, both of these machines have three USB-C ports. However, they are not the same. The M4 is going to have three Thunderbolt 4 ports, whereas the M4 Pro is going to have three Thunderbolt 5 ports.
Thunderbolt 4 is going to provide data transfer speeds up to 40 Gb/s, and Thunderbolt 5 is going to double that at 80 Gb/s. It also has the ability to dynamically allocate up to 120 Gb/s for video bandwidth when needed. By the way, another key thing to note here that was not the case last year is that the M4 and the M4 Pro both have the same external display support. That is, two external displays up to 6K 60 Hz.
Unlike last year with the base M3, you know, I couldn't use my dual display setup, but now I can with the base M4, which is nice. As far as when you open up the MacBooks here, you can't really see a difference between the two; we have the same keyboard, and the display specs are the same. We have the 14.2 in mini LED promotion display with that glorious 120 Hz refresh rate. This year, on both models, Apple did up the SDR brightness to 1,000 nits when outdoors, whereas with the M3, it was 600 nits.
So that's great, and of course, the display will peak out at 1,600 nits when watching HDR content. I did actually take both of these machines outside because I wanted to test not only the 1,000 nits of SDR brightness but also the Nano texture versus non-Nano texture. I will tell you right now that Nano texture is absolutely the way to go if you are somebody who works outside, in a coffee shop, or just really anywhere where there's a lot of natural light.
I've realized it before, but this really opened my eyes to how many reflections are actually hitting the screen and kind of taking away from what you should be seeing. The Nano texture really diffuses the light really well, and I'm a big fan of this, especially down here in Florida where it's just sunny out most of the time.
As far as the boring stuff, the internal specs: the M4 does have the 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, whereas the M4 Pro has the 12-core CPU and 16-core GPU. In terms of RAM and storage, both of these are the base models. The M4 is going to be 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. You can also go up to 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage for the M4.
For the M4 Pro, we start at 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, and you can also go up to 48 GB of RAM and 4 TB of storage. So really, if you were to upgrade the M4 RAM to 24 GB and match the M4 Pro, you're really only paying $200 for the upgraded chip and those extra CPU and GPU cores.
Now, even if you did upgrade the RAM on the M4 to 24 GB, it's not going to be the same as the RAM on the M4 Pro because the M4 Pro has higher memory bandwidth. The M4 has 120 GB/s, and the M4 Pro gets 273 GB/s. So the M4 Pro will be able to handle more tasks at once, especially when they are more intensive.
By the way, these are both the 14-inch models. You can also upgrade the M4 Pro to 16 inches; you can't do that with the M4. The M4 is only 14 inches, but the M4 Pro can be taken up to 16 inches for an extra $500, and that does also add two CPU cores, four GPU cores, and a 140 W power block.
Speaking of power, I should also mention the battery life here. The M4 gets 16 hours of web browsing and 24 hours of video streaming. The M4 Pro gets 14 hours of web browsing and 22 hours of video streaming.
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Okay, so now let's move on to the fun stuff: let's talk about the benchmarks and then also some real-world testing. One thing I want you to keep in mind throughout this entire video is that the M4 Pro has two cooling fans inside, whereas the M4 only has one cooling fan inside. I will tell you that you can hear the difference. I did not think you'd be able to hear as big of a difference between the fans on these two, but you can.
Okay, so let's start off with the Blackmagic disk speed test to test out the read and write speeds for each of these. The M4 scored a 3343 on the write and a 2929 on the read, compared to the M4 Pro, which had a 4038 on the write and a 5700 on the read. So, very impressive scores. We do still have, you know, green check marks on the M4, so it's not like the M4 is any slouch; it still performs great. But you can see the big difference there in read and write speeds for the disk.
Now, if we go on to the Cinebench test, this is where it also gets a little bit interesting. You can see that on the M4, we scored a 13,368 on the multicore and a 2178 on the single core, giving us an MP ratio of 6.14. On the M4 Pro, we got 18,764 on multicore and 21.99 on the single core, and that was an 8.53 MP ratio. As far as Geekbench 6 goes, we did get a 3678 on the single core and a 14,345 on the multi-core for the M4, compared to a 3860 on the single core and a 23,71 on the multicore for the M4 Pro.
We also ran the GPU test using OpenCL. We scored a 37,817 on the M4 and a 60,853 on the M4 Pro. We did also run a speedometer test as well; this is a web browsing benchmark to see if there's any difference in web browsing speeds. We got a 44.3 on the M4 and 46.0 on the M4 Pro, so not a big difference when it comes to web browsing tasks, which might be important to note if you're someone who uses a lot of web applications.
We also ran an Xcode benchmark, so we can see that the build time for the M4 was 156 seconds, and the build time for the M4 Pro was 35 seconds. Then, of course, we did some real-world testing. We started off with a Final Cut Pro video export test; this was a 26-minute 4K 60fps video. It exported on the M4 MacBook Pro in about 5.5 minutes, and on the M4 Pro, it took about 2.5 minutes.
So, similar to what we saw with the M4 and M4 Pro Mac Minis, the pro chip is significantly faster with video exports. Doing a little Final Cut Pro export, the M4 Pro spins up the fan a little bit, but the M4 does not.
Interesting. After that, I wanted to test out the file transfer speeds. We transferred over a 65 GB folder that had over 100 files in it, and that transferred over in 2 minutes and 45 seconds on the M4 and 2 minutes and 19 seconds on the M4 Pro. Keep in mind that is with a Thunderbolt 4 connection. That's a Thunderbolt 4 SS; if it's Thunderbolt 5, it's going to be even faster on the M4 Pro.
After that, I played around a bit in Lightroom. I was testing out the AI features in Lightroom and just adjusting the color of an image. At the same time as editing in Lightroom, we had Final Cut Pro exporting another video, we had several tabs open in Safari, and I even had music production going in Reaper. I had like almost 30 tracks or over 30 tracks on each of these playing at the same time in Reaper.
We had everything going at the same time on both of them, and this is where I was really impressed with the M4 MacBook Pro because it didn't give me a beach ball at all. It did not freeze up; it did not give me any issues whatsoever with that 16 GB of RAM.
Now, you can see there is a little bit of swap being used there, around 1.5 GB. But what I found even more interesting is that with the M4 Pro, despite having 24 GB of RAM, there was more swap being used during the same process. You'll notice on the M4 Pro, we got up to 3 GB of swap being used, and there were three different red sections on the memory pressure.
We didn't have any red on the M4. So, I found that to be very interesting. But neither one of them had any issues with all of these tasks. It took up a lot more memory for some reason; Lightroom took up so much memory on the M4 Pro. I'm not too sure why it wasn't like that on the M4, but regardless of what this shows, neither one of them had any issues running all these tasks at the same time, which was very impressive.
So with all that being said and after you've seen all these tests that I've run over the past couple of days, which one should you buy? Should you buy the M4 or should you buy the M4 Pro? I would say that the M4 is now viable for pro users, in my opinion. This is not just a machine for web browsing and daily use only; it's a legit machine even for heavy workloads.
I do have to say that these 16 GB of RAM is a big reason for that. I think 16 GB of RAM is going to be enough for most people. Another big benefit, again, I didn't get to test this in my week of usage just yet, but we do have the same amount of ports on both models. So, if you end up needing to plug in random things throughout the year, you're not going to run out of ports on the base M4 because you have three Thunderbolt ports, unlike last year where you only had two.
This color right here, space black, is now available for the M4, so just another reason that you don't necessarily have to go M4 Pro if you were a big fan of the space black color. Now, again, battery life: you're going to have better battery life, not just for basic daily tasks like web browsing and watching videos, but also when you're doing more intensive things.
So, my M4, I had these both charged up to 100%, and then ran all these tests. The M4 ended up with 76% remaining; the M4 Pro ended up with 64% remaining.
Okay, so I've been praising the M4 a lot. Let's talk about the M4 Pro. Who is the M4 Pro MacBook Pro for? I would say that you're looking at a MacBook Pro, so the chances are, the odds are that performance is your top priority. I'd say that the base M4 does give you plenty of that, but if you absolutely know that you need more than the base configuration—16 GB of RAM and/or 512 GB of storage—just get the M4 Pro.
The extra benefits you will get will be well worth the cost for whatever demanding tasks that you throw at it. Even if it's not something very demanding, because again, the M4 handled those demanding tasks just fine, surprisingly. But you know, even if it's just basic video exporting, you're going to see significantly faster export times. The file transfers are going to be maybe 20% or more faster if you use Thunderbolt 5.
So, I just think the M4 Pro this year really offers the best bang for buck in terms of performance because it is a good bit faster when it comes to pretty much everything that you would do. Yes, the M4 is good enough, but if you want true professional performance, the M4 Pro is amazing. I feel like the M4 Pro is almost equivalent to the Max chips from previous years—maybe not quite, but that's the feeling I'm getting after using the M4 Pro for a little bit.
Also, if you run everything off of external drives like I do, Thunderbolt 5 can be beneficial for those faster transfer speeds. But the reality is, Thunderbolt 4 is likely just fast enough for anything you throw at it. Unless you have a crazy monitor setup, but it is still nice to know that you do have Thunderbolt 5.
You know, maybe for future-proofing—I don't like saying future-proofing, but that could be something that you might want to look at if you are considering the base model with that base 512 GB of storage because you will likely be using external devices, whether that be an SSD and/or a Thunderbolt dock.
Those are my thoughts on the M4 and M4 Pro MacBook Pros. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, let me know in a comment down below and also give this video a thumbs up.
If you want to see more testing or different types of testing in my upcoming review for the M4 MacBook Pro or the M4 Pro MacBook Pro, I'll probably do a review on both. Let me know what you want to see in those videos in the comments down below. I always learn from you guys down there who tell me and open my eyes to different things I did not think about testing, so I would appreciate it if you gave me some suggestions down there.
But anyways, guys, thanks for watching, and I'll see you soon.