Apple should unveil the M4 MacBook Pro refresh sometime in the coming weeks. That’s what all the rumors say. Well, Apple is about to update various Macs this fall, with the M4 chip being the biggest upgrade. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who mentioned the M4 Macs several times in the past few months, said over the weekend that Apple might launch the new Macs on November 1st.
It’s unclear whether Apple will hold a special event for the new Macs and iPad mini 7. The latter is also supposed to come out this fall. While we wait, I’ll point your attention to a hands-on video that gives us an unboxing of the purported base M4 MacBook Pro model.
The YouTuber seems to have gotten their hands on the M4 MacBook Pro that appeared in a leak a few days ago. Photos of the alleged M4 MacBook Pro box suggested that Apple would equip the base M4 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, just as rumors had claimed. The unboxing video confirms the detail, offering a benchmark test for the alleged Mac.
The MacBook Pro in the video seems legitimate, though it’s unclear how the YouTuber got it. The video is in Russian, so you’ll need a translation app to make up what he’s saying.
Gurman said on X that the M4 MacBook Pro in the clip seems to be legitimate. The only issue with it is the use of the same wallpaper on the box. Apple could always decide to stick with a particular wallpaper for multiple generations of the same product, no matter how unlikely it might seem.
You don’t have to understand Russian to figure out some of the claims in the video. The laptop has 16GB of RAM and three USB-C ports. It also comes in Space Black, a color that Apple only used for the M3 Pro and M3 Max chip versions this year.
These details match the leak from earlier late September. The alleged M4 MacBook Pro box mentioned these specs, hinting the laptop would come in black.
As for the M4 chip, the YouTuber put the 10-core CPU through a Geekbench 6 benchmark test that indicates the base model would feature the same performance as the M4 chip Apple used for the OLED iPad Pro earlier this year. Apple introduced the M4 chip with the new iPad Pro models. The expectation was that Apple would use the chip in the base M4 MacBook Pro models.
The Geekbench 6 benchmark listing shows the M4 MacBook Pro matches the performance of the M4 iPad Pro. We’re looking at speed gains of about 25% compared to the M3 chip in the current MacBook Pro models.
The benchmark is available at this link. It identifies the laptop as a “Mac16,1” device that features the Apple M4 chip paired with 16GB of RAM. If the laptop in the clip is fake, someone has gone through a lot of trouble to also fake all this information.
If genuine, the M4 MacBook Pro will deliver a few big upgrades to make the base model more exciting. How do we know it’s a base model? Well, Apple used 18GB as the base amount of RAM for the more expensive M3 MacBook Pro models. Upgrades started from there, going to 36GB, 48GB, 96GB, and 128GB for both the 14-inch and 16-inch models. Also, the more expensive M3 MacBook Pro featured M3 Pro and M3 Max chips.
Meanwhile, the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro ships with the base M3 chip and 8GB of RAM. You can upgrade the memory to 16GB and 24GB, but that’s it.
This tells me that the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro in the hands-on video below must be the cheapest M4 MacBook Pro variant that Apple will sell in stores later this year.
