Apple introduces its first 24-hour MacBook but, for once, it’s playing catchup

As part of a series of announcements this week, Apple has unveiled the latest generation of MacBook Pros powered by the Apple M4 family of CPUs. Buried amongst the flurry of specifications was the claim of up to 24 hours of battery life for wireless video streaming, which, if true, makes these laptops Apple’s longest-lasting yet.

And that is, unequivocally, a very good thing. We’ve been recommending Apple’s MacBooks pretty much without interruption ever since the company moved to Apple silicon back in 2020, mainly because of battery life. And these new laptops are better than ever – improving on the M3 MacBook Pro 14in by two hours for wireless video streaming.

For once, though, it feels as if Apple is playing catchup and that’s because, in 2024, Windows laptops have taken a huge leap forward in this very area.

One of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve reviewed this year has already breached the 24 hour barrier in our testing – the Acer Swift 14 AI – and the early signs from the laptops we’ve tested with the latest Intel Series 200V chips inside (the Asus Zenbook S 14 UX5406, for instance) indicate that, increasingly, other Intel-based laptops are going to be MacBook-competitive as well.

M4 Apple MacBook Pro (2024): What else is new?

Visibly, not much has changed about the new machines, either. The new MacBook Pro laptops come in 14in and 16in sizes, as before, and nothing about the chassis appears to have changed. They’re available with the same flat-topped aluminium chassis and in silver or “space black”. Around the edges, we have the same selection of ports as before, too: a pair of Thunderbolt ports, one HDMI output, a MagSafe 3 charging port, an SDXC card slot and a 3.5mm headset jack.

And while Apple says the Liquid Retina XDR display has been improved, other than providing customers with the option of its anti-glare “nano texture” finish (at an extra £150), the specifications otherwise look similar as well. Peak brightness reaches 1,000 nits in SDR and 1,600 nits in HDR playback, and resolution is identical across both models.

One positive change is that the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro model is now £100 cheaper at £1,599 (with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD) than it was last year. If you want the larger 16-inch MacBook Pro, however, you’re still going to have to stump up a huge wedge of cash because there just isn’t the option to buy it with the plain M4 and prices start at a whopping £2,599. Although for that money, rather outrageously, Apple only provides a 512GB SSD. For context, you can buy a microSD card with that much storage on Amazon for £35.

Of course it isn’t just battery life that the M4 MacBook Pro laptops have improved upon in this latest generation. There’s a new 12-megapixel webcam, which is a welcome improvement, and the second-generation 3nm M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips bring faster performance. The 14in M4 MacBook Pro is “up to 1.8x” faster than the M1 MacBook Air and memory bandwidth gets a “75% increase” according to Apple.

There’s support for the latest Thunderbolt 5 standard, too, which promises to deliver data transfer speeds up to 120Gbits/sec. You only get that if you buy one of the M4 Pro or M4 Max machines, though – the base laptop only gets Thunderbolt 4 as before – and Apple has also held back support for Wi-Fi 7 across the range. The M4 MacBook Pro machines support ‘only’ Wi-Fi 6E, which is hardly forward looking.

M4 Apple MacBook Pro (2024): Final thoughts

None of this is particularly surprising. Apple has been incrementing on performance and battery life ever since it first launched M1 and it has never been the first to adopt the latest networking standards. This isn’t a dramatic step forwards; it was exactly what we expected to see and nothing more.

With Intel and Qualcomm laptops catching up on battery life, though, I’d like to have seen some concessions on price and storage, both of which feel even less justifiable than ever. A 512GB SSD in a laptop costing £2,599 is outrageous when the price of flash storage has never been cheaper, and holding back Thunderbolt 5 from the base model feels petty.

I’m not saying Mac devotees should necessarily tear their gaze away from theM4 MacBook Pro range. These laptops will be faster than ever, have better battery life than before and will still be the best machines for heavy duty creative workloads. But for anyone who just wants a fast, reliable laptop that lasts for ages – the price may be too high and the standard specification too low to justify continuing to splash out.