Watch Apple's M4 MacBook Pro announcement video

Like the iMac and Mac Mini videos, the new MacBook Pro video can be viewed on Apple's website by clicking the “Watch Announcement” link on the product page or on the company's YouTube channel. This video begins again with Apple's SVP of Engineering, John Ternus, honoring the hardware reveal. He says it's “packed with professional features, Apple intelligence, and Apple silicon that's more powerful than ever.” Then he opens the new notebook and a gust of wind blows his hair back.

Next up is Trevor McLeod, Senior Engineering Program Manager for Mac Systems, who reveals that the new M4 MacBook Pro, still priced at $1,599, is now available in the Space Black color that previously marked the high-end Subject to final specifications. McLeod says the new 14-inch M4 is up to 1.8 times faster than the M1 at tasks like photo editing and has a neural engine that's “up to three times more powerful than in the M1,” resulting in better performance which contributes Apple Intelligence functions. Like the iMac and Mac Mini, the MacBook Pro series also ditches the paltry 8GB RAM base option and now starts with 16GB for the entry-level model with an M4 chip.

Meanwhile, the M4 Pro version of the MacBook Pro now starts with 24 GB of RAM instead of 18 GB like the M3 Pro version. According to Tim Millet, vice president of platform architecture at Apple, the high-end M4 Max chip option has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. Additionally, it has a consistent memory bandwidth of more than half a terabyte per second, which is “four times the bandwidth of the latest AI PC chip.” Apple also released a CPU performance chart that promises the M4 Max is 1.2x faster than the M3 Max.