M4 MacBook Pro Reviews: Processor Benchmarks Impress, New Nano-Texture Option Worth the Extra $150

[[{“value”:”The first wave of reviews of Apple’s new M4-powered MacBook Pro models were published this morning. We’ve collected some of the latest impressions from YouTube channels and select media outlets below.

Apple last month announced the new 14-inch and 16-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌ models, adding next-generation M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips, with Thunderbolt 5 ports on higher-end models, display changes, and a few other updates.

Nano-texture Display

The Verge‘s Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

As for doing my edits on the nano-texture display, I know glossy screens have a slightly deeper contrast, but I love not worrying about glare. I’m not exclusively editing in a dark room with a hooded reference monitor, and I like the flexibility of working in places with less-than-ideal lighting conditions. The convenience of the nano-texture far outweighs any slight technical advantage of a glossy display. And at $150, it’s a worthwhile upgrade for visual pros.

TechCrunch‘s Brian Heater:

Simply put: If you’re buying a new Pro and plan to go outside ever, spend the additional $150. I presently have two Studio Displays on my desktop. One is nano-textured, the other isn’t. It makes a huge difference, even indoors. In fact, at one point I rearranged the two screens in a way that minimizes the glare from the one window in the room.

Glossy displays on Macs are one of those things we complained about years ago, but at a certain point, many of us were worn down by Apple’s refusal to offer an alternative over the years. I had given up on the idea years ago. Now that it’s available, I plan to get it for any MacBook I get, going forward.

M4 Performance

The Verge‘s Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

You won’t see the same performance in grueling workloads as you would if you spent a bit more to get an M4 Pro or a lot more for an M4 Max, but the standard M4 has some marked improvements over the M3. The M4 fared about 64 percent better than the M3 in Cinebench’s standard multicore test, and it maintained around a 41 percent delta when running a longer, sustained 30-minute loop of the same benchmark. It’s got two more cores than the M3 we tested, so it makes sense for the M4 to excel here, but its single-core scores in both Cinebench and Geekbench were also over 20 percent better. The machine was up to 25 percent faster in GPU benchmarks with the same number of GPU cores, too.

ZDNet‘s Kerry Wan:

Unsurprisingly, the M4 MacBook Pro outperforms its predecessors, as well as some of the latest Windows machines running on Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) chipsets. It’s quite spectacular to see the $1,599 M4 MacBook Pro outpacing a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip that I paid almost $3,000 for.

TechRadar‘s Lance Ulanoff:

Apple is now backing all of its new Macs with at least 16GB of RAM. This pays dividends in AI (Apple Intelligence is on board) and graphically intense operations like ray tracing, which helps make games like Lies of P look incredible on the MacBook Pro 14.

In benchmark testing, I found the numbers in line with the M4 performance I saw from the iPad Pro 13 inch. Geekbench 6.3 numbers measurably exceed those of the M3 in my MacBook Air.

When I played Shadow of the Tomb Radar, Steam’s internal frames per second counter showed I got anywhere between 42fps and 62fps. To my eyes, there was no tearing or dropped frames.