Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Brilliant – but only a little bit better

Laptops like the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, for instance, might barely be different from previous models as, sometimes, a product doesn’t need much in the way of updating. Yet in cases like this MacBook Pro, it’s the changes found on the inside that matter.

And while some might say that’s disappointing, or that Apple should really try harder, I’m perfectly happy with it. This is a laptop that ticks all the boxes when it comes to build quality and ergonomics and, despite a design that’s now three years old, I don’t think it looks at all aged, either.

Sure, it could have more ports (show me a laptop that wouldn’t benefit from this) and Apple could sell it at a lower price (if only) but there aren’t many things that the 14-inch MacBook Pro desperately needs. It’s a superbly made, very fast, workstation-class laptop with ludicrously long battery life. What more could you ask for?

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: What you need to know

As I’ve already mentioned, this laptop is exactly the same machine as I reviewed the last time I looked at the MacBook Pro 14 inch.

There are some small changes. For a little extra money, you can specify the screen with a “Nano-texture” anti-glare coating and the screen delivers higher sustained full brightness with non-HDR content.  Outside of these, you would struggle to tell the difference between the M4 MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Pro from two years ago, assuming the older laptop had been properly taken care of by its owner.

The only significant difference is on the inside, where Apple has added the latest M4-based chips to the range. I was sent the M4 base model to test for this review but you can also configure your 2024 MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro or an M4 Max chip.

I first saw M4 silicon in the Apple iPad Pro early on in 2024, where it delivered stellar battery life combined with rapid performance and I’ve just reviewed the gorgeous Apple Mac mini, where the M4 Pro chip delivered even more stupendous performance at incredibly high levels of efficiency. This M4 MacBook Pro emulates both, delivering better battery life than before and a big leap forwards in power.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Apple M4 chipset with 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, 120Hz 3,024 x 1,964 IPS display with Nano-texture coating. Price when reviewed: £1,949

As ever, you can configure the MacBook Pro how you like, according to your needs or your budget. Prices start at £1,599 for the base M4 model with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Upgrading to the aforementioned Nano-texture display option costs an extra £150 on top of that, doubling the storage to 1TB adds another £200 and you can keep going until you reach a ceiling of £2,749 for the M4 model, which comes with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.

Move up to the M4 Pro machine and prices take another leap. There are two M4 Pro models of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The first with a 12-core CPU and 16-core GPU starts at £1,999 and comes with 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The second has a 14-core CPU and a 20-core GPU and starts at £2,199.

The M4 Max machine, meanwhile, begins at £3,199 and, again, there are two different versions. The “cheaper” one has a 14-core CPU and a 32-core GPU, with a base 36GB of unified memory; the fully tricked-out model has a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, with a starting helping of 48GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. The price for that is £3,699.

If you want all the bells and whistles (and the timpani as well) then expect to pay £7,049 for the top M4 Max, 128GB of RAM, an 8TB SSD and the Nano-texture display option.

As far as competition goes, there are plenty of Windows workstations around that offer plenty of performance but none that can match the MacBook Pro’s ability to combine that with great battery life. With Intel’s latest 200V series chips and Qualcomm’s ARM-based X Elite laptops, that may yet change, but so far the only laptops we’ve seen have been thin and light consumer grade laptops that can’t match even the regular M4’s performance levels.

Still, we’ve been impressed with how well machines like the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 have performed, especially for battery life. This, and the latest Asus Zenbook S 14 shows where Windows laptops are headed, but they haven’t quite reached the level of the MacBook Pro just yet.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Design and features

As with the previous two generations of MacBook Pro – and indeed most of its other laptops – Apple keeps things simple and elegant with this year’s 14-inch model. It’s available in Space Black or silver, both of which have a smooth satin finish, a flat lid, underside and edges, and the chassis is made from solid, unyielding aluminium.

It isn’t the lightest laptop for its size, tipping the scales at 1.6kg (the 16in model is 2.1kg), but what you give away in terms of lightness, you gain in robust, bombproof build quality. Give it a twist and there’s no creaking whatsoever and very little disconcerting flex, even in the lid.

Around the edges, ports are at a premium but there’s enough here – with the addition of a USB or Thunderbolt hub – to keep most demanding users happy. On the base M4 MacBook Pro you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left edge right next to the MagSafe 3 charging port, and a full size HDMI 2.1 output on the right edge alongside another Thunderbolt 4 port and a full sized SD card slot.

On the M4 Pro and Max models those Thunderbolt 4 ports get a juicy upgrade to Thunderbolt 5, dialling data transfer speeds up to a maximum 120Gbits/sec, and all the Thunderbolt ports on all models support DisplayPort and USB PD (power delivery) charging.

As for external displays, the M4 and M4 Pro models support the simultaneous connection of up to two external 6K screens at 60Hz (or one 8K screen at 60Hz), while the M4 Max supports the connection of up to three external 6K screens at 60Hz and one 4K screen at 144Hz over HDMI.

The only thing I take issue with here is that the two Thunderbolt 5 ports on the left edge are too close together which means you can only plug in a couple of slim cables side by side. The same is true of the right edge, with the HDMI output port, remaining Thunderbolt 5 port and SD card slot all cheek by jowl. It might look neat, Apple, but give me a few more millimetres between ports and I’d be a lot happier.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4,2024) review: Keyboard and touchpad

As ever, the keyboard on the MacBook Pro is excellent, with all memories of the butterfly-switch keyboard being largely banished by now. I have a couple of minor gripes here – the cursor keys are half height when there’s ample room for larger ones and the travel is a little on the shallow side – but the key action itself is lovely, with a nice, positive click of feedback and a solid base that doesn’t flex or bounce at all.

I’m particularly fond of the noise the keys make as you type on them – there’s a taut, low-frequency twang to it that makes it sound like you’re typing on a particularly tight (albeit quiet) drum. And the light-sensitive backlight works nicely, too, although it is a little frustrating that you can’t simply tap a keyboard shortcut to adjust its intensity.

The huge Force Touch trackpad is a pleasure to use as well. It’s huge, super responsive to single finger taps and multi-touch gestures alike and its glass top feels as smooth as silk under your fingers. The best thing about it, though, continues to be its refined force feedback engine, which works beautifully, allowing you to click or double click as easily in the top left corner as you can at the bottom right.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Display and speakers

As we’ve come to expect from the MacBook Pro, the Liquid Retina XDR display is superb. It’s equipped with ProMotion, which is Apple speak for 120Hz and it’s sharp as a tack at 3,024 x 1,964 for the 14in and 3,456 x 2,234 on the 16in. Its IPS mini-LED panel can also reproduce 100% of the P3 colour gamut (107% by my measurements) and goes as bright as 1,600cd/m² during HDR playback.

New this year is the ability to produce sustained brightness of 1,000cd/m² with regular SDR content – I measured it reaching around 900cd/m² in my testing – and the ability to specify Apple’s anti-glare Nano-texture coating for an extra £150.

Colour accuracy is excellent. I measured its ability to reproduce colours in the sRGB colour space and in both the laptop’s default mode and specific sRGB colour mode it performed well, delivering average Delta E colour variance scores of 1.08 and 0.82 respectively (lower is better; below 1 is pretty much perfect). You can also select from a number of other professional photo and video profiles, from DCI-P3 to NTSC. Although, as before, AdobeRGB is disappointingly absent from this list.

The screen can also be set up to adapt to the colour temperature of the room in which you’re working using Apple’s True Tone tech. There’s Night Shift to reduce blue light when working in the evening or late at night and there’s also an auto-brightness mode to enhance comfort levels even more.

That Nano texture display coating works brilliantly, too. I compared it side by side with the glossy screen on a 15-inch MacBook Air and I found it significantly reduces the intensity of light sources without having much of an impact on the display quality. On the flip side though, you do get much more of a spread of light. Either way, I think for the majority of people it’s an upgrade well worth making.

The speakers and microphone haven’t had an upgrade, alas, but they remain first class. The speakers kick out a full-bodied sound that means you don’t always have to connect your headphones to enjoy a TV show or spot of music. They lack low frequency oomph, as you’d expect, but for clarity and presence, they’re unsurpassed among laptop speakers.

The “studio” microphones, meanwhile, are capable of recording audio at the sort of quality that’s good enough to pass muster on a podcast or YouTube video recording on the road if you forgot to take your microphone with you.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Performance and battery life

The biggest upgrade, in my eyes, is the M4 series of processors, which I’ve already seen in action in the M4 Pro Mac mini. The chip inside my review sample here is the regular M4, which comes with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU and 16-core neural engine and it’s backed up by the standard allocation of 16GB of Unified Memory and a 1TB SSD.

It’s a quick chip. As you’d expect, it performs slightly worse in the benchmarks than the M4 Pro, but that chip has a couple more CPU cores and a more powerful GPU. It’s quicker than the 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro by a chunk.

It’s also a more powerful machine than both the Snapdragon X Elite-based Surface Laptop 15in and the Asus Zenbook S 14 Lunar Lake machine I tested recently, particularly when it comes to GPU performance.

I’ve rarely heard the fan power up, and when it does, it’s whisper quiet and the SSD is nippy as well, able to hit sustained read and write transfer speeds of 3,055 MB/sec and 3,113 MB/sec respectively. Perhaps most impressive, however, is that, while ramping up the power levels, Apple has also improved the MacBook Pro’s efficiency.

In our simple offline video playback battery test, it lasted 20hrs 13mins – the longest I’ve seen from any Apple laptop and the second longest battery life I’ve seen from any laptop, period. The only laptop I’ve tested to last longer than this, in fact, is the Snapdragon X Plus-based Acer Swift 14 AI, which lasted a full 24 hours in the same test.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M4, 2024) review: Verdict

This 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro is a stupendously good laptop. It has a great screen, amazing battery life, fast performance and it’s built like a tank. What it isn’t, however, is a huge step forwards over the M3 models released in November last year, or even the M2 versions released the year before that.

Yes, the display is brighter and, yes, it comes with the option of that wonderful Nano texture finish. But if you already own an M2 or M3 machine and you’re hankering after a big upgrade, this won’t deliver it. I’d advise holding fire until the M5 MacBook Pro at the very least.

If you have an M1-based machine, however, then the step-up is starting to look significant and it might be time, just about, to make the leap.