Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Max)
The M4 Max MacBook Pro is absurdly fast and finally has a proper webcam. You'll pay dearly for both.
Apple’s M4 Max MacBook Pro 16-inch is the laptop equivalent of buying a Porsche to commute to the grocery store. It’s also, regrettably, exactly what power users have been asking for — which makes it hard to stay snarky.
The headline numbers
The M4 Max bumps to a 16-core CPU (12 performance, 4 efficiency) and up to a 40-core GPU. In Geekbench 6 the chip hits around 3,900 single-core and 26,500 multi-core — a brutal, stupid amount of performance for a laptop that weighs 2.14 kg. Cinebench R24 multi-core lands near 2,600, which is desktop workstation territory circa 2023. Memory bandwidth is now 546 GB/s, and you can configure up to 128GB of unified memory. Yes, you can load a 70B-parameter LLM entirely into RAM and it won’t break a sweat. I tried.
Battery life is the genuinely unreasonable part: 22 hours of video playback and a real-world 12–15 hours of mixed development work. It outlasts every Windows competitor by a margin that’s almost embarrassing.
The display
The Liquid Retina XDR panel is a 16.2-inch mini-LED at 3456×2234, sustaining 1,000 nits full-screen and 1,600 peak HDR. Sustained full-screen brightness is the differentiator — most competitors throttle. Color accuracy ships ΔE < 1 out of the box in P3.
What finally got fixed
The webcam. After years of grainy 720p humiliation, Apple fitted a 12MP Center Stage camera with a wider field of view. It’s still not a real camera, but it no longer makes you look like a Minecraft character on Zoom.
What still annoys
- The notch. Still there. Still eating menu bar real estate.
- Only three Thunderbolt 5 ports and an HDMI 2.1. One more USB-C would be nice for $3,999.
- The 16-inch still runs warm under sustained all-core loads — fans spin to ~42 dB.
- macOS Sequia still sandboxes power users into increasingly annoying “permissions” dialogs.
The verdict
If you edit 8K video, train models locally, or compile large codebases for a living, the M4 Max is the only laptop that matters. If you’re a knowledge worker who writes docs and joins Zoom calls, buy the M4 base model instead and pocket the $1,500 difference. The M4 Max exists to make other laptops feel slow — and it succeeds at exactly that.