Apple’s week of Mac announcements concluded this morning with the debut of the new M4 MacBook Pros, completing the picture of the M4 chip lineup set to power Macs for the next year (excluding the M4 Ultra, whose release remains uncertain).
The M4 series currently includes the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips. Today, Apple also unveiled the new M4 Pro and M4 Max, which, in Apple’s words, “form the most advanced family of chips ever built for a personal computer.”
The M4 Pro offers up to a 14-core CPU with 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, delivering 1.9x the speed of the M1 Pro’s CPU and 2.1x that of Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V. Its GPU, with up to 20 cores, achieves graphics performance twice that of the base M4 and up to 2.4x faster than Intel’s chip.
Supporting up to 64GB of unified memory at 273GB/s bandwidth, it offers 75% more bandwidth than the M3 Pro and twice that of “any AI PC chip.” Thunderbolt 5 compatibility also enables data speeds up to 120Gb/s, more than doubling Thunderbolt 4’s capacity.
The M4 Max, meanwhile, features up to a 16-core CPU with 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, making it up to 2.2x faster than the M1 Max’s CPU and 2.5x faster than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V. With a GPU of up to 40 cores, it performs 1.9x faster than the M1 Max and up to 4x faster than the Intel chip.
The M4 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with 546GB/s of bandwidth, which is four times the bandwidth of “the latest AI PC chip,” though Apple does not specify which chip it’s comparing against. Additionally, the M4 Max includes two video encode engines, two ProRes accelerators, and Thunderbolt 5 support.
As expected, both the M4 Pro and M4 Max fully support Apple Intelligence on macOS Sequoia.
