The Fastest Laptop in the Game: Apple's MacBook Pro M4 Leaves All Else in the Dust

Apple is once again refreshing the stellar MacBook Pro chassis it released in 2021 with a new chipset. With the M4 Max at the top of the lineup, the company regains the crown as the fastest consumer chip on the market. So yeah, these things are fast. There’s a little more to it than that, but let’s start with the speeds and feeds because that’s where the magic happens this time around.

We were able to get our hands on an M4 Max-equipped MacBook Pro and put it to the test, and boy, does it impress. Apple’s latest M-series chip is built on the second-generation 5-nanometer process and features an 8-core CPU. The GPU has also been upgraded to a 20-core integrated unit.

These components all add up to notebook that outperforms virtually all of its competitors, according to both artificial benchmarks and real-world testing. Compared to its predecessor, the M4 Max offers up to 25% higher CPU performance and a whopping 30% boost in graphics capabilities. This represents both one of the biggest annual upgrades to the Mac lineup we’ve seen in a while and, again, the fastest consumer laptop on the market today.

With this much power under the hood, you’ll hardly be surprised to learn that everything runs smoothly on the MacBook Pro. We tested video editing, software compilation, and even some heavier 3D modeling to our delight, and the M4 handled it with aplomb. No stuttering, no hesitation, just the laptop doing its thing with ease.

The caveat is as follows: all that power requires power - the battery. So while Apple managed to squeeze out an incredibly good result with the M4, some of it has to come at the cost of battery life. It isn’t terrible, and some people won’t have issues, but we’ve observed the battery life in certain situations is slightly less than we’ve experienced in past models. In either case, the new M4 chip - as a whole - still seems like an improvement.

Speaking of which, some of the other improvements, like the display, SSD speed and even speakers have seen updates, albeit minor, tweaks and upgrades have been the name of the game here as it’s only one year since the last iteration. So while this may not be the year of the most revolutionary product refreshes ever, it’s still Apple delivering on its promise of iterative performance enhancements over the previous year’s offerings.

At the end of the day, not many vendors can say their laptops have the highest speeds in the market, if you have money to spend, you’re hardly going to do better than this.