Apple M4 Mac Week: More Memory, More Powerful Silicon, Carbon Neutral Mac mini
Apple spread its Mac and Apple Silicon announcements over most of a week with launch videos and press releases. It’s a clever way to take advantage of the viewership it gets from its highly-produced video launches without the expense of a live event at Apple Park. I suspect that this is more about Apple SVP WW Marketing Greg Joswiak experimenting with launch storytelling post-pandemic than strict cost savings; Apple is still meeting with media, analysts, and influencers individually and in groups.
MacBook Air
Perhaps the biggest news of the week is that Apple is bumping up the base configuration of the MacBook Air M2 and M3 to 16 GB at the same price. The MacBook Air is Apple’s best-seller, so this change is arguably more impactful to the market than a new mini or faster pro models. While Apple is undoubtedly motivated in part by the desire to make Apple Intelligence more performant – 16 GB is likely the minimum required for managing on-device models responsively – the spec bump will make a big difference for anyone who pushes their Mac’s browser tab count high enough.
It should be noted that Apple still charges far more than component costs justify for upgrading memory further, or for choosing larger SSDs. In some ways, that makes the baseline 16 GB spec even more important, and elevates base model iMacs and Mac minis to comparative bargains.
iMac
Apple started the announcements with an updated iMac. The new iMac has Apple silicon M4, Apple Intelligence, brighter colors, color-matched keyboard & mouse, a new 12 MP camera + deskview, a $200 nano-texture option for the display, and now comes with 16GB RAM standard at the same $1299 starting price as before.
The iMac wasn't underpowered -- the M3 provides far more power than many all-in-one PC buyers need -- but the new M4 and minimum 16GB RAM futureproofs it for running Apple Intelligence's on-device models. Apple is claiming the M4 iMac is 6x faster than old Intel iMacs, so if you have an aging iMac, it's going to be a HUGE upgrade.
Nano-textured displays are often considered for use outdoors, but the lower glare should pay dividends in rooms with direct sunlight or with point overhead lighting — like many kitchens that the iMac could find itself in. We’ll have to get hands-on to determine if the $200 upcharge is worthwhile, but this is not a feature that the competition offers at all.
Apple is not the only PC OEM to sell all-in-one designs. HP, Lenovo, and Dell all do as well, and they include thoughtful designs like HP's Envy Move, and endless variations of Lenovo's ThinkCentre for the enterprise. Still, Apple sells them to consumers in significant volumes and has since the iMac revitalized the company in 1998. The simplicity of the design seemingly relegates them to light household computing tasks -- if you need portability, a specialized monitor, or a discrete graphics solution, this isn't the form factor you want. However, Apple's definition of computing has always skewed premium and towards content creation, so its baseline iMac now includes an absolutely beastly processor, extremely high-resolution (if slightly small) monitor, and enough GPU and Neural Processor resources to edit video with AI effects. In the color of your choice, should you decide to coordinate your iMac with your kitchen.
Apple also finally updated its keyboards, mice, and trackpads with USB-C. Unfortunately, it looks like only the connector was updated, and the only way to get the colorful ones is by buying a new iMac. Purchased separately, it's either black or white.
On a personal note: I'm going to need that new Magic Trackpad -- it's the only one that works with Apple Vision Pro, which I've been using more with Annapro's more comfortable headstrap. The Trackpad doesn't need to be recharged often, but when it does, I have USB-C cables everywhere vs need to find a Lightning cable in a drawer somewhere.
Mac mini
On Day 2 of M4 Mac Week, Apple completely redesigned the Mac mini, hit an enormous sustainability milestone, and introduced the Pro version of the Apple silicon M4.
Apple's new Mac mini is the first carbon neutral Mac. Unless I'm mistaken, it's the first carbon neutral PC of any kind. The Mac mini is made with 85% less aluminum than before, over 50% recycled materials, 100% renewable energy for the design and manufacturing process, and is packaged and shipped using less energy. While no new product process is perfect, eco-conscious consumers should be able to upgrade to a Mac mini relatively guilt-free.
However, unlike the iMac which is aimed primarily at consumers (exhibit A: the purple iMac), the Mac mini has also made significant inroads into the enterprise as desktops and servers. Apple execs told me that they expect that some enterprises will buy Mac minis to help meet their own environmental goals. It's also worth noting that Apple's focus on running as much AI on-device has positive environmental impacts as well as privacy and security.
As with the updated iMac, the new Mac mini now comes with an Apple silicon M4. However, Apple is also offering it with the first M4 Pro. Apple says that the M4 has "the world's fastest CPU core." Like previous Pro versions of its chips, the M4 Pro scales up the CPU, GPU, and NPU (“Neural Core”). Memory bandwidth across those cores is up 75% over M3 Pro, which Apple claims is twice the bandwidth of any AI PC chip. Apple repeatedly compared the M4 and M4 Pro to Intel’s latest Core Ultra 2. In my testing, there are aspects where AMD and Qualcomm outperform Intel, but it’s still a fair comparison overall; Intel is expected to be the volume leader, and Core Ultra 2 is a huge leap from prior Intel generations.
The new Mac mini has been completely redesigned. It is now genuinely tiny, a rounded 5” x 5” cube only 2” tall, but it has more ports — including two USB-C on the front — and more capable Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports on the rear, along with Ethernet and HDMI. The Mac mini supports up to three displays, and base configurations now come with 16 GB of memory, which, along with the M4 or M4 Pro’s power, should future-proof the Mac mini for Apple Intelligence. Apple points out that the M4 Mac mini is 13x faster than an old Intel Mac mini, so upgraders are going to notice. Despite the higher performance and memory configuration, the base Mac mini starts at the same $599 price point. (You can, of course, configure the Mac mini with every option — including the highest end M4 Pro, 64 GB system memory, and 8 TB of storage — for $4699. No consumer will do that; the performance and memory options make sense together for coding and render farms; the storage options are there for server buyers.)
I do wish that Apple would offer monitors for it in the $600 - $800 range (Apple’s least expensive monitor is $1600), but the Mac mini itself is hard to fault.
MacBook Pro
While the iMac and MacBook Air didn’t really need improved silicon, the MacBook Pro is a different beast. The MacBook Pro is both Apple’s aspirational laptop in its starting $1599 configuration and a work tool in the $2500 – and up price points. This is not too dissimilar to U.S. truck buyers who need a full sized pickup for its towing capacity, and the legions of additional truck and SUV buyers who treat it like a family sedan that can do anything ‘just in case.’
There are now three levels of Apple silicon available for the MacBook Pro: M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max, each with ever more cores sharing the memory architecture. Despite the additional power, Apple is claiming the new MacBook Pro gets up to 24 hours of battery life, and the platform continues to support full performance whether plugged in or on battery. In its marketing materials and briefings, Apple benchmarks the M4 and M4 Pro against Intel's latest Core Ultra 2 to show that the M4 remains ahead, despite significant improvements Intel’s newest “Lunar Lake” platform makes over past Intel chips. It’s worth noting that Qualcomm and AMD beat Intel’s latest on some benchmarks, too.
However, for the M4 Max, Apple’s marketing comparisons are not aimed at Intel, but at comparing specific workloads on an M4 Max MacBook Pro against older Macs. This isn't a pitch about switching away from Windows, it's about how, for the right workloads, upgrading from anything to the new MacBook Pro can pay for itself with efficiency (see clip from Apple’s press release in the photos below). That’s good, because while the MacBook Pro starts at $1599, fully optioned systems can reach “amortized capital investment” territory.
Like the other Macs, the new MacBook Pro now starts at 16 GB of storage, and, along with the M4 and a few other upgrades, that makes the base configuration a reasonable product for those who want more performance and ports than a MacBook Air.
The base M4 MacBook Pro can drive two high resolution displays in addition to its own. The internal display can now reach 1000 nits in SDR (new) in addition to the 1600 nits in HDR as the prior generation. That additional brightness will be especially welcome for those who spend $150 on the optional nano-texture option, which I expect will be more popular on the MacBook Pro than the iMac or even the iPad Pro, where there are concerns about scratching it.
The webcam gets a resolution upgrade to 12MP with deskview. On the base M4 MacBook Pro there are now three Thunderbolt 4 ports – one more than before. Move up to an M4 Pro or M4 Max, and those ports get even faster with Thunderbolt 5. Whichever processor configuration is chosen, Apple continues to offer the MacBook Pro in two sizes – 14” and 16” – and two “colors:” silver or space black. There is no pink MacBook Pro, no matter how much iJustine wants one for editing her videos on the go.
Conclusion
Apple updated its Mac line with more memory, more power, equivalent or better battery life, new nano-texture options for its displays, its first carbon-neutral computer, and no price increases. This is in addition to new macOS software that brings better windowing (my favorite Windows 11 feature) and begins the process of bringing Apple Intelligence to the platform. Apple’s RAM and storage upgrade pricing remains high. I’d love to see a larger iMac, a standalone monitor for the Mac mini, and an OLED MacBook Air. That said, it’s hard to find much to fault with the 2024 Mac lineup.
With Apple silicon M1, Apple sprinted ahead of Intel and AMD on performance per watt, and Apple built on its lead as it grew the line with Pro and Max variants and again with the M2 and M3. Qualcomm’s entry into PC silicon and the growing importance of NPUs spurred innovation at Intel and AMD, and we now have a slew of options that offer strong performance, exceptional battery life, and huge NPUs for AI workloads. I haven’t tested a bad Windows laptop in months. Apple could still have relied on its software and ecosystem moat to fend off the competition, but instead it came out swinging with the M4 family. Techsponential looks forward to getting hands on with at some of the new M4 Macs and seeing how the new silicon performs.
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