Mac Week continues. After announcing a new iMac and Mac Mini earlier this week, Apple is now taking the wrapper off a new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro, which now is powered by the M4 chipset platform, and can be upgraded to the first-ever M4 Max processor. These are follow-ups to last year’s MacBook Pro models and are largely spec bumps to outfit the hardware with more power.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599 for the base model but goes all the way up to $3,199 if you upgrade the CPU and GPU with more cores, plus increase the storage and unified memory to the max. The 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,499 and climbs to $3,999 for the fully-kitted out version. Both are available for preorder now and ship on November 8.

New Chips in Town

The MacBook Pro retains the same Mini-LED screens, 120-Hz refresh rate, 1080p webcam, and six-speaker sound system as its predecessor. One new addition is support for Center Stage with the 12-megapixel webcam, which will automatically keep your face in the frame during video calls. Center Stage was previously only available on iPads and Apple’s Studio Display, but now it’s on the MacBook (and was also added to the new iMac).

Speaking of the Studio Display, Apple brought over the nano-texture glass option, which reduces glare—helpful if you often work by a window or outdoors. As usual, this is an add-on upgrade, so it’ll cost you an additional $150 and is available for all configurations.

The base MacBook Pro now sports three USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 (one more than on the M3 version), an HDMI, an SD card slot, a high-impedance headphone jack, and a MagSafe charging port. It’s available in space black and silver. If you opt for the version with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chipsets, you get three USB-C Thunderbolt 5 ports for faster data transfer speeds along with the same other connectivity options.

If you don’t need a super powerful chip, you can pair the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the entry-level M4 and 16 GB of unified memory. However, this option does not exist with the 16-inch MacBook Pro. You have to get it with either the M4 Pro or M4 Max.

So what’s the difference between the M4 Pro and M4 Max? The M4 Pro can be upgraded to a 14-core CPU and an up to 20-core GPU. The most powerful option is the M4 Max, which packs a 16-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU. These chips are built on a second-generation 3-nanometer process, fitting more transistors into a smaller space to enhance efficiency and speed. The M4 Pro and M4 Max enable features like mesh shading and ray tracing—Apple says the ray tracing engine is now twice as fast as on the M3 chips.

Naturally, they support Apple Intelligence too. Now available in macOS 15.1, it includes artificially intelligent features like Writing Tools, summaries for transcriptions in the Notes app, Clean Up in Apple Photos, Smart Replies in Messages, and more. You can read more about these features in our macOS Sequoia roundup.

We’ll put the new MacBook Pro through its paces soon to see how it compares to the older MacBooks and the competition. It’s worth noting that Apple has now upgraded the M2- and M3-powered MacBook Air it sells with 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB starting at $999, presumably so they can handle Apple Intelligence tasks without stressing the system.

This week’s hardware announcements mean nearly the entire Mac lineup has been refreshed in 2024—with an updated MacBook Air kicking things off at the start of the year. All that’s left is the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, both of which are powered by the M2 Ultra (with a GPU that can be configured to 60 or 76 cores and more memory bandwidth than the M4 Max, the M2 Ultra remains the most powerful chip for heavy-duty, graphics-intensive tasks). Those Mac devices are rumored to get an upgrade to the M4 platform in 2025.