M4 Announcements
iMac
The iMac received a bigger-than-expected update this time around, with a new nano-texture display option and an upgraded front camera in addition to the M4 speed bump.
I think I prefer the new colours over the old ones, too. The old generation was confidently going for a two-tone style, which I didn’t love. The backs of the new iMacs are a little more desaturated, though, while the lighter fronts are mostly unchanged. In sum, that means there’s less contrast between the colours used on the back and the front. It looks a bit more cohesive to my eye.
Mac mini
The darling of the week, the new Mac mini is super cool. It is drastic enough to turn heads. Rather than shipping empty space, the M4 Mini is compact and befitting of the efficiency of the technology inside it. The redesign essentially looks like a Mac Studio chassis, that has been shrunken down to a plump, five-inch square size.
An older incarnation of Apple design would have probably rejected the idea of putting ports on the front of their consumer machine, and kept that as a Mac Studio exclusive detail. But not so here. The new Mini has two USB-C ports and a headphone jack proudly facing outward.
MacBook Pro
The M4 Max chip is incrementally better than last year’s, with Apple quoting a roughly 20% performance jump, and a 35% increase in memory bandwidth, compared to M3 Max. Each core is faster, but the number of cores did not change. That is unlike the M4 Pro, which saw much more significant differences over its predecessor.
Remember that last year, Apple downscaled the ambitions of the M3 Pro chip, with a balanced configuration of 6 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Memory bandwidth was significantly reduced, too. It’s still unclear why they opted for that approach. The M4 Pro basically pretends like that diversion never happened; it returns to the trend of the earlier M1 and M2 Pro. As such, the M4 Pro is decidedly pro again, with a 14-core CPU composed of 10 beefy performance cores and four efficiency cores, and memory bandwidth is higher than ever before, at 273 GB/s.
Outside of raw performance, the chip enables some welcome improvements for the laptops themselves. The base M4 MacBook Pro can drive two external displays at the same time, finally. And it has a third Thunderbolt port. Both the M4 and M4 Pro versions are also rated for the best MacBook Pro battery life ever, topping 24 hours on a single charge. Curiously, though, the quoted battery life estimates for the M4 Max MacBook Pro are actually slightly worse than their M3 Max counterparts.
USB-C Magic Accessories
Apple replaced the Lightning ports with USB-C on the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse. And changed nothing else.
Not that I was necessarily expecting more, but it still feels a little disappointing that they only did the bare minimum here. What I had been really hoping to see is some kind of new pairing system that makes switching your keyboard and mouse between Macs as seamless as AirPods can switch between your devices when playing audio. Alas, we keep waiting.