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Laptops · Apple MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro M4

105owners with an opinion
56%of verdicts positive
49/39positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and battery; criticized for software and reliability.

What owners wrote

Neutral
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks. But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to. The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
Doesn’t like it
So unbelievably disappointing, right after the disappointment of the Duo. I was in the market for both, the early reviews of the Duo stopped me from upgrading, and the landing page of this new Mac has stopped me from upgrading that. 1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately. 2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either. 3. OLED is nice. 4. 24h battery life is nice. 5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up? 6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros. On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
Likes it
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port. I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro). I'm very excited for the future.
Doesn’t like it
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
Neutral
> long-life > and durable keyboards It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever. In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
Doesn’t like it
It has been at least a few months since I did some testing on my MacBook Pro m4, where I converted a bunch of camera jpegs to jxl losslessly, and yeah the jxl files were smaller, but the decoding/viewing experience on macOS was worse than with jpegs. Thumbnails were missing, and just browsing through a folder of them with QuickLook was unbearably slow compared to jpeg, perhaps at least few hundred milliseconds or even longer than a second, when the JPEGs were instant. Idk if that’s just Apples implementation not good yet, but that’s why I at the time abandoned converting all my JPEGs to lossless jxl
Doesn’t like it
Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all. I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel. Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
Doesn’t like it
Yep, I have an M4 MBP company issued laptop for work and in my day to day there's not a enough of a performance win to feel like I'm missing out for most tasks. Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri. Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case. After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
Likes it
Creator of Ghostty here. Always a fan of new terminals. I noticed your benchmarks are against Ghostty 1.3.1, which is fair, since its the latest released, but our IO throughputs in particularly the areas you tested have improved by more than double on some machines, so if you get a chance, I would ask you rebenchmark on `main`. I don't know if it'd be faster than your terminal or not, but it'd be significantly faster than 1.3.1. On my M4 MacBook Pro, ASCII processing improved by about 2.8x, if that holds in your benchmarks, it would be faster than shitty. But, who knows. I'd prefer you ran it yourself.
Likes it
> do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks This is probably the case for a lot of people, but Apple is smart with their lineup and there are several what I'd call "not pro" features that are gated by the MBP (and iPad pro) which is unfortunate. Primarily, 120hz screen, SD card reader, HDMI port. None of those are really "pro" featuers, they're just basics I'd expect on any premium laptop. That being said, 3 years is a tad on the aggressive side for an upgrade cycle for a laptop. I just upgraded my M1 last year, and this M4 Pro will easily last a year or two longer before I feel a compelling need to upgrade, outside of getting RAM constrained. Use case is photo+video production. So for me, a 5 year cycle would be about right. But also depends on how you spec it out. If you are just buying the base model, then 3 years makes sense. If you spend extra to max it out, you'll be able to hold onto it for 6+ years.
Doesn’t like it
My Arch Linux KDE Desktop with the Haswell i7-4770S CPU (from 2013) actually feels snappier than MacOS on my MacBook Pro M4. Sure, the MacBook has far superior performance overall, but if you just want to move some windows or get a response from a right-click, it just feels slower.
Doesn’t like it
Yeah, it's been fun for me running models (mostly Qwen 3.6 27B) on my 48GB M4 MacBook Pro. When i'm using it to run models, it's basically unusable for anything else - I actually do the work on my Macbook Neo. Took me a while to figure out why the models couldn't figure out how to make tool calls - because LMStudio by default uses a 32K input window, which is smaller than OpenCode's prompt, so half of the instructions were being pruned from the middle!
Neutral
So I downloaded the model and tried a few Math prompts. The simple addition was a little tedious because it checked multiple times that the calculation was right, I then gave it a quite long integral to solve but which is straightforward if you know the techniques, and it got it in 5 minutes on my Macbook Pro M4 Pro 24 GB, I just had to increase the context window. I finally tried giving it a full math exam but here it wouldn't score much points as it takes so many shortcuts it writes wrong steps in its answers. Still pretty good as it generally identifies what it should do, but I did not try anything in that weight class before so I can't really talk if that's impressive in the full picture.
Neutral
I think it is work to set up but I'm also learning a lot setting it up. Mainly using qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b mlx with my 48GB M4 MBP which leaves me just enough headroom for docker dev-container and other basics. I use LM Studio to run and am using it via VSCode. A big difference made the system prompt improving the tool integration (I asked GPT for guidance on that). Before that it was not making changes but regenerating code often messing up than helping. I mostly run my MBP on low power even when it is plugged in to avoid the noise and heat. Full power maybe doubles speed but more than doubles power. What can it do: Simple restructuring of pages. Where did it and other models fail: Splitting up Pinia store which GPT-5.4 did without fail. I think with more tuning, guidance for tool use and maybe some support tooling around it performance can increase further.
Neutral
I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux. I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that there's no dramas. The layout is great: Occasionally there's keys that are too small (looking at you, apostrophe) but everything is at least in the right spot, which is way more important. The 2K display at 10" is high enough DPI that everything is totally crisp, and you can unlock ~95Hz (bad for video, good for everything else) with a bit of a tweak. You can also smash a byte into the EC at the correct offset and access the full unrestricted BIOS -- mostly to crank the RAM up to 4800MT/s. I'm running vanilla Arch with Niri and Noctalia, and it's a dream. It's my primary dev machine, used in combination with a remote server with a tonne more grunt. If it broke tomorrow, I'd buy another - and I wouldn't do that with my macbook. To the OP: * Accelerometer support, EC-byte-bashing to get BIOS unlock: https://github.com/greymouser/minibook-x-tools * 95Hz EDID fix: https://github.com/sonnyp/linux-minibook-x/issues/7#issuecom...
Neutral
Thank you for checking out VT Code! Yes, VT Code supports connecting to local LLMs through two main providers: LM Studio and Ollama. But local LLMs inference is experimenting, as I don't have enough hardware with large VRAM to test it, my main machine is MacBook Pro M4 with just 16 GB Ram. The community always have asked for it and I would love to have sought contributor on these regards. My initial vision is to support open weight and local inference. So LM Studio and Ollama are supported but still have bugs. https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode/blob/a154162f/docs/provider... Notes: VT Code also supports custom OpenAI-compatible providers through the custom providers' configuration, allowing you to connect to any local LLM server that exposes an OpenAI-compatible API: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode/blob/a154162f/docs/config/C...
Likes it
Linux on Mac Pro 5.1 from 2009 and 2017 MacBook Air, both working perfectly. I prefer actually both to my corporate issue M4 one with MacOS. I'm not a fan of the Mac UX, but the hardware seems pretty damn good and the lifespan extends with it. If I'd have no limitations though I'd prefer the Framework, but not very clearly.
Likes it
I've been testing local AI models on an M4 Pro with 48GB RAM for the past few weeks. Earlier in the year, small models that could run on my laptop felt like demos of Claude / Codex. The newer Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.6 releases are the first ones that felt useful enough for everyday research, coding assistance, and personal knowledge work. The post is a practical snapshot of what changed for me: frontier AI pricing is going up, quality has been less predictable, and small local models are finally good enough to test seriously without buying GPUs. It's time to test out what's "good enough" for personal use cases, so we can reduce reliance on high-cost, low-privacy options that we're all used to right now.