Apple will start selling M4 Macs this Friday, December 8. While this seems like the best Mac lineup to date, the Cupertino company outdid itself by adding a never-seen-before feature to its MacBook Pro models: a nano-textured display.
This matte screen isn’t entirely new. Apple has been offering it on some of its computers and displays for a while. However, it has never been available on devices you carry around with you every day—at least not before this May, when Apple introduced a nano-textured display option for the iPad Pro.
At the time, I considered adding this technology to my iPad Pro purchase. However, I thought media consumption would be one of the main reasons I’d be using the tablet, and I didn’t want to lose the perfect contrast while using it.
While I would have had to spend much more for the nano-textured version of the iPad Pro (Apple requires users to choose at least the 1TB option), it hasn’t done the same with the MacBook Pro. Every M4 model offers this matte display option.
Another factor that might make the nano-textured display one of the best features of the new MacBook Pro is the maximum brightness for SDR content outdoors. Apple now offers up to 1,000 nits of brightness for SDR content in outdoor environments and up to 1,600 nits for HDR content. Previously, users were locked to 600 nits in everyday usage and needed a third-party app to unlock it—hello, Vivid!
With that change, users can have a better experience when using their MacBook Pro models outdoors. The nano-textured display can also help improve the viewing experience because the matte screen can block all ambient light (or direct sunlight).
While I still have yet to test it, early reviews of the M4 MacBook Pro with this display option have been very positive, and it seems that people have liked it more on the Mac than on the iPad.
This new computer has many other perks that could make it an enticing upgrade, even for those with an M1 MacBook.
