Time to Go Pro

Apple’s MacBook Pro has, for long, been the mobile workhorse of choice for professionals of all manners, but its base, entry-level model has been something of a dilemma, a conundrum of sorts. It had the same chip as the current-gen MacBook Air, albeit with active cooling for better performance, packed into the marginally chunkier chassis of a MacBook Pro but with lesser memory and one fewer port. It was named a Pro, but it sure didn’t feel like one. With the new MacBook Pro M4, all that changes…and you no longer have to make the choice between affordability and futureproofing your purchase.

Year on year, you’re not going to see much of a difference in design from the 2021 overhaul that added all the ports right back in, only this time the striking Space Black colorway is available even on the base variant. Coming from the 2.14kg MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) I use, the 1.55kg, 14-inch is a welcome change – granted, the screen is a tad smaller, but the gains in portability are massive. This time around, all MacBook Pros come with three USB-C ports, Thunderbolt 4 on the M4 and Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro/Max, along with the HDMI port, an SD card reader, a headphone jack and the MagSafe power connector. Even on the base model, you can connect two external displays while leaving the laptop open. None of the models get the bump up to Wi-Fi 7, but Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 are still current. The keyboard and trackpad remain as good as ever, and as good as TouchID is on the Mac, one’s left wishing for Face ID to make its way onto the Mac. 

Onto that gorgeous display, arguably the best mini-LED display by a country mile and bested only by really good OLED displays. You get a 120Hz ProMotion display with a wide color gamut and higher brightness levels of 1000 nits in standard dynamic range mode, the ‘everyday’ mode most people will be using when they’re not looking at HDR photos or watching HDR movies. Plenty bright for outdoor use, but handier is the optional Rs. 15,000 nano-texture coating on the display. This anti-glare, matte-textured display option does an incredible job of cutting down glare, especially if you’re working in brightly lit offices with direct lighting bearing down on the display. Most reflections simply stop at the screen edge, and the effect is rather dramatic – I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call it a revelation. Flipside, you will need to accept slightly reduced contrast as compared to the regular glossy display. Atop the display is the new 12-megapixel FaceTime camera – aside from the boost in resolution, you also get Center Stage and Desk View capabilities for added versatility. 

Inside, the big upgrade is Apple’s latest M4 series of chips, and the base model starts with 10-core CPU/10-core GPU plus a welcome upgrade to 16GB of memory – double that of its predecessor. In testing, the M4 was expectedly fast, not only handling regular productivity duties and daily tasks on macOS Sequoia with elan, but also complex ML-based edits on large files in Pixelmator Pro. Coming from a M2 Pro MacBook Pro, everything felt more spritely and the M4 MacBook Pro responded noticeably faster while performing edits on high-res raw files in the Lightroom catalog I imported over. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Asphalt Legends managed respectably as well, and all of this power is on tap without the MacBook Pro being plugged in. One regularly saw the MacBook Pro lasting between 14-18 hours of regular use, which included lots of browser use, streaming music, messaging apps along with some light photo and video editing. Class-leading stuff. 

The new MacBook Pro is a solid year-on-year upgrade, with small improvements adding up to a much better product which should strongly interest folks who last picked up a Mac around the end of the Intel era, slightly less so for M1 Air/Pro owners. Courtesy the added memory and extra port, multi-monitor support and nano-texture option, the new base MacBook Pro finally gets serious, and goes from being a questionable proposition in the previous generation to a solid value choice this time around.  

Rating: 8/10

Price: Rs. 1,69,900 onwards