Apple has launched a new suite of Macs sporting the M4 chip — continuing its expansion beyond powering just the iPad Pro.
Over the past few days, we’ve seen the M4 iMac, a redesigned M4 Mac mini and a turbo-boosted M4 MacBook Pro. As for the M4 MacBook Air, you’ll have to wait until early 2025 for that, with the Mac Studio and Mac Pro reportedly approaching at the end of next year.
But let’s focus on the here and now. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, Intel Core Ultra 200 series and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 may have ruled the roost in the AI PC space for a little while there, but Apple’s fighting back hard.
Here’s what we know about the M4 chip so far. And for the specific hardware announcements, check out our hub of everything Apple announced this week.
Apple M4 chip: Release date and price
November 8 is a great date for Apple. All the M4 Macs will drop at this time, and pre-orders are open.
Right now, you can pre-order the M4 iMac from $1,299, the M4 Mac Mini from $599, the M4 Pro Mac Mini from $1,399, and the M4 MacBook Pro from $1,599.
Apple M4 chip: Different chip models
We’ve seen the M4 chip in three flavors: the standard M4 with either 8 or 10 CPU cores, the M4 Pro with up to 20 GPU cores and the M4 Max. All of these bring significant gains to graphics performance with up to 2x faster ray tracing performance, and a massively beefed-up Neural Engine (or NPU to those who are used to the Copilot+ PC lingo).
In the M4 MacBook Pro leaks, we got a look at some benchmarks, and the results are clearly rather impressive!
Two other key things we’re seeing about M4 in these Mac announcements is the support for multiple displays on standard M4, and the Pro variant getting Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. That is seriously turbo boosting data transfer speeds, which alongside the RAM packing 273GB/s of memory bandwidth (twice as much as any AI PC chip), this is going to be a multitasking monster.
Only one that is left for us to find out about is the M4 Ultra. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Apple stitches two M4 Maxes together in a new Mac Studio.
Apple M4: AI features
Apple Intelligence has launched in iPadOS 18.1 and MacOS Sequoia 15.1 — albeit in a bit of a restricted sense. This phased roll-out means users can currently use it to Rewrite and Proofread text, transcribe and summarize audio recordings, search for pics in Photos with natural language, and make use of a more intelligent, conversational Siri.
With version 18.2 and 15.2 respectively in December, you can expect more features like Visual Intelligence, ChatGPT integration, and creating Genmoji.
Apple M4 chip: Outlook
With new hardware, M4 is really starting to hit its stride. The speeds are impressive, and the big AI upgrades unlock a lot of performant Apple Intelligence operation.
We’ll update this post with all the M4-related news we come across, so stay tuned for more!
