MacBook Pro M4 Review — The Creator's Powerhouse

This is the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro chip — the point where Apple's lineup stops being a general-purpose laptop and becomes a genuine creator's workstation, aimed at video editors, developers and audio engineers who need more sustained power than the base M4 or a MacBook Air can offer.

The M4 Pro's 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU handle real creative workloads well: multi-track video timelines, large RAW photo batches, and compiling sizeable codebases all stay smooth, and 48GB of unified memory means several memory-hungry apps can stay open at once without hitting a wall.

The 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display (3024×1964) is bright, sharp and color-accurate enough for real color-grading work, the aluminum unibody remains as solid as ever, and battery life comfortably covers a full day of creative work rather than just light use.

It costs meaningfully more than the base M4 MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, and that premium only makes sense if you're regularly pushing sustained, multi-core workloads. For anyone who is, the extra CPU/GPU cores and memory headroom are worth paying for; for lighter use, the base M4 is the smarter buy.