MacBook Pro M4: Review & Recommendations

Just subscribed YIPPEE Ty Josh

Apologies for my previous comment. I didn’t know you actually read and reply. I just bought the m4 pro chip 12 core and I wanted to know if based on the graphs the expected performance of this machine would be relatively close to the 14 core. I’m assuming a small drop off but how significant would you say?

I think it's not fair to compare to these windows gaming laptops. Instead it should be compared to professional/workstation laptops like Thinkpad P1, HP Zbook and other similar laptops. Usually they have better battery time and less noise.

Also the GPU test here is not showing real world performance. All the gaming laptops in the test will outperform the M4 in most games for example.

Really a super review, perhaps the most comprehensive that I’ve watched. Especially appreciated the comparison between pro and Max chips on the 14 inch models. Thank you for some great content!

I really love this channel for Mac product reviews. No bullshi in the videos

The battery remaining test (30min of cinebench) is kind of meaningless. Why see remaining battery after they will have produced different amounts of works (as in the powerful ones will have finished more cycles) ? It is a lot more meanignful to provide the same task.

Somethings off about the m4 pro 14 core charts in this video. First of all the main charts say it hasa 16 core gpu when it should be 20, and then on the power drawn vs performance dot graph there's only a m4 12 core on here, so are you guys using the 12 core or 14 core coz this is weird

@JustJoshTech why you missed MacBook Pro 14 (M4 12C)?

Here is a mistake in table comparing, on apple website there is no Macbook pro 14 (M4 10C) there are only
MacBook 14 (M4 10C) (it's not pro)
MacBook Pro 14 (M4 12C) (not 10 as you may see in the video)
MacBook Pro 14 (M4 14C).

Hey Josh, On the video you mentioned that you had skipped buying the M4 Pro 12c, and in all the CPU benchmarks you are showing results for M4 Pro 14c which comes with 20c GPU. However, while comparing GPU benchmarks, you are mentioning 16c GPU model which is with the 12c CPU. Can you confirm if its the 12c CPU with 16c GPU used for testing in the later test or otherwise?

For the programming section I'd love to see something for us mobile devs! I professionally develop Android apps and often compile the project I'm working on to run on an emulator. In my spare time I also do cross platform work with Kotlin Multiplatform and often run the project on an Android emulator & iOS simulator at the same time, I think this load would nicely show differences between machines with different CPU/RAM configs as well as from generation to generation. In these scenarios I'd be looking at general snapiness and build times.

I often wondered what the equivalent MacBook is to the Mac Mini M4 and M4 Pro, and why the MacBooks have max chips when the Mac Mini is only up to the M4 Pro? Yes, there are no screens or keyboards built into minis, but I was just curious all the same. Like, if I get a Mac Mini M4 Pro, what would the twin brother be in the laptop version?

what should i get for programming.
M4 32GB 1TB for £1970
M4 Pro 48GB 1TB for £2330

both are about 20% off on black friday

Near 4090 performance ?? Yeah…with 128 GB of RAM. Run that Mac w/16GB again and see😂😂😂😂

Hey Josh, Ross Young and blurbuster's creator have pointed out the these macbooks have actually improved displays, they use quantum dot. Apparently that leads to noticeably better response times, could you investigate that?

Please black friday videoo!!

First video I watched from you guys. Great content! Subbed! Had a question:

The heaviest task I would do would be editing video. Only really suggesting to get the m4 pro for the 24Gb of ram. worth it? or is the base 16gb ram enough? Looking to upgrade my 2015 MBP has had enough.

Something I am still confused about—so some of the 14" MacBook Pros DO have 2 fans? Or you have to go a 16" to get the two fans?

Josh do you think that getting a G14 for video editing would be a mistake? budget is under 2k.. and in order to get a mac pro under 2k.. I'd have to get less ram and less space.. I'm really conflicted! I wish you'd make a video specifically about your picks for video editing. I edit 4k in premiere.

I miss Macbook Pro 16 M4 Pro in the review. Why is just the M4 Max in 16? (I want to buy that one xD It's maybe the same performance of the Macbook Pro 14 M4 Pro?)

Crème de la crème of laptop reviews!

MacBooks do NOT hold their value in the secondhand market anymore, especially with upgrades. I bought an upgraded M2 Air heavily discounted at the time (40% below Apple pricing), and I STILL lost nearly $1k during my recent upgrade to a M4 Pro. Please do not factor in resale when purchasing. The resell value, even one year later, will be far lower than you expect, as Apple is on the yearly update cycle

I would like to see a efficiency graph for single core. These lunar lake seem pretty low power. Are their single core results any good? I mostly care about single core and battery life for webdev

M4 pro 12 core or 14 core?? I guess what I wonder is how much of a battery usage difference is there? Isit a difference of hours or minutes? And does 14 core get too hot and cause system to throttle

Right now I have a MacBook Air early 2020 intel i5 / 8 GB RAM / 256 GB SSD. I bought it when It came out for simple school tasks and all the online classes needs I had. During quarantine I started coding and as of now I code in Swift with Xcode (iOS apps) and in Dart/Flutter. To be honest, my MacBook has done a really good job, but a new and more powerful machine is what I need now (additionally, I'm entering college next year and might study software engineering or other similar career). I was waiting for the M4 MacBooks to come out but now I'm not sure which model I should buy. I was thinking about the base model with 1 TB storage upgrade, but I've seen lots of reviews saying that the M4 Pro is the best price/quality option; additionally, it may suit better my requirements. In my country, the difference is of around $500 USD (consider 1 TB for both), which I'm not sure if I should pay. Also, I'm thinking of getting the new nano-texture display upgrade. Could anybody give me any suggestions?

I really need a macbook but can't afford one :(

What would you recommend for a CS student, macbook wise, im going into university in the fall and have ~$2000 to work with. If i can go cheaper while still staying apple that is fine too, I personally want something I won't have to upgrade through university

is this a good laptop to play roblox on?

Ah, waiting for nvidia cpu now, which would be a contestant to max series of chips

mac mini review when

Imagine that tiny integrated GPU can beat the best graphics card from Nvidia

Brilliant works Josh, especially the chart comparing Power Effieciency!

And as primarily a windows user, I'm jealous again. Maybe I should get a macbook next honestly. I've been jealous for over a decade for how good the speakers have been but since apple silicon dropped, that performance and efficiency is just unmatched. Not like there's a lot of games that I have the time or inclination to play these days so I probably won't miss much.

Phenomenal review. One extra area you could touch on is the panel speed, which has a noticeable effect on gaming experience and overall ghosting. For example, the panel speeds in macbooks have generally been horrendous, the M2 lineup was a slight improvement over M1, and M4 with quantum dot is a decent improvement over M3, allegedly.

Always look forwards to your videos! Great stuff!

Would greatly appreciate some compilation benchmarks for programmers (maybe Linux/Firefox/chromium/LLVM).

Awesome review mate, just love it 🤝🏻
The way everything is explained in detail , big fan...
Also, would like to see a common programming test for all 🙏🏻

So its just GPU more memory bandwidth, wattage, cores then

Great comparaison

As a business college student looking for a new laptop, the biggest things im worried about is compatibility with excel, battery life, playing games. Im debating between the new asus zenbook with lunar lake or the MacBook pro m4. Which one do yall think i should get

until they bring down the weight, it's a no for me. Doesn't matter how fast it is, when most of people will never need it

One thing that may make you upgrade to a max chip that is worth mentioning is external display support. I use 3 external displays so I had to get a m3 max last year.

Thank you, Sierra, for slowing down in this video. It makes such such a big difference in digestibility of large-scale graphs of specs and test results. I also think it's good to weave Josh and Sierra in and out throughout the video, rather than handing off to Sierra for the rest of a review, since most viewers will stay for the entire video this way until we get more accustomed to Sierra. And it's no offense!! I'm sure any video that has, for example, Linus versus not Linus, or MKBHD versus not MKBHD, etc., will perform better. We started watching for a specific person who was engaging, and we got used to enjoying listening to that person. Anyway, this was one of the best videos from this channel, from start to finish (and I've been a viewer since the beginning). Having this much information in a 23-minute video that we could reference in the future when we are choosing between one of these machines is outstanding, and having Windows devices in the test results and analysis only makes it more comprehensive.

Regarding your recommendation to not get the Max chip on the 14" MacBook Pro: if your use case requires connecting to more than two external displays, then the Max chip is your only option. In this case, I would recommend going with the lower-end binned Max Chip to ameliorate the cooling issue with the 14" chassis.

What I’m thinking about is the difference between the 16” M4 Pro 48/512 and the 16” M3 Max 36/1tb. At Best Buy they are about the same price except for about $100.