Apple unveils cheaper and faster MacBook Pro lineup, shaving as much as $300 off

Apple has finally unveiled a laptop designed for the artificial intelligence era - that’s cheaper than its previous model and features what it says is the longest battery life ever on a MacBook.

The new MacBook Pro with M4 chip.

Apple has finally unveiled a laptop designed for the artificial intelligence era - that’s cheaper than its previous model and features what it says is the longest battery life ever on a MacBook.

Apple released its new MacBook Pro lineup early on Thursday morning, capping off a week of upgrades - centred on the AI frenzy - including a new iMac and Mac Mini, fitted with powerful new M4 chips.

For the MacBooks, Apple has unveiled two new chips, M4 Pro and M4 Max. It said all new models could deliver up to 24 hours battery life - which Apple said was the longest ever in a Mac - and exceeds Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs by two hours.

The tech titan also continued its price cuts, slashing $300 off the 16-inch M4 MacBook Pro, which now starts at $3999 versus $4299 for last year’s model. For the smaller 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro, it has wiped $200 off last year’s price, with it now starting at $2499.

It comes five months after rival Microsoft launched its own AI-powered PCs that it heralded as the biggest advancement at the company since Windows 95.

Apple says the M4 Macbook Pro delivers up to 24 hours' battery life.

Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus said the new M4 family of chips have been “built from the ground up” to cater for the AI boom, including increased memory bandwidth, so “large language models and other large projects can run smoothly on the device”.

Other new features include a 12MP centre stage camera, which adjusts to a user’s movements, and an improved antireflective “nano-texture” display.

“MacBook Pro is an incredibly powerful tool that millions of people use to do their life’s best work, and today we’re making it even better,” Mr Ternus said.

“With the powerful M4 family of chips, and packed with pro features like Thunderbolt 5, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, an all-new nano-texture display option, and Apple Intelligence, the new MacBook Pro continues to be, by far, the world’s best pro laptop.”

The new MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of faster unified memory with support for up to 32GB, along with 120GB/s of memory bandwidth. Mr Ternus said with the M4 chip, MacBook Pro was up to 1.8x faster than the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro - the first fitted with Apple’s in-house chips - for tasks like editing gigapixel photos, and more demanding workloads like rendering complex scenes in Blender, which were up to 3.4 times faster.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro now comes in space black.

The M4 chip features an up to 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and up to six efficiency cores. If that’s a mouthful, Apple says a 10-core GPU provides graphics performance, up to 2 times faster than M1, “making everything from editing photos to AAA gameplay exceptionally fast and smooth”.

The M4 Pro chip supports up to 64GB of fast unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth, which Apple says is a 75 per cent increase on the M3 Pro and “two times the bandwidth of any AI PC chip”.

The release of new laptops designed for AI workloads, has catapulted the technology into the mainstream, with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella describing it as a “seminal moment” akin to the launch of Windows 95 three decades ago. He said it allowed computers to edge closer in being able to understand a user’s intent.

“The pursuit has always been about how to build computers that understand us, instead of us having to understand computers and I feel like we are close to that real breakthrough. We’re entering this new era where computers not only understand us but can actually anticipate what you want,” he said.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said AI will “transform what our users can accomplish”.

“Apple Intelligence builds on years of innovation in AI and machine learning to put Apple’s generative models at the core of our devices, giving our users a personal intelligence system that is easy to use — all while protecting their privacy. Apple Intelligence is generative AI in a way that only Apple can deliver, and we’re incredibly excited about its ability to enrich our users’ lives,” Mr Cook said.

‘Transforming what our users can accomplish’: Tim Cook.

The technology will now reach more people via Apple’s move, which will make its AI-platform, Apple Intelligence, available in Australia in December.

Apple has rebuilt its latest iPhone 16, iPads, iMac and now MacBook Pros for AI.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said Apple Intelligence’s features included tools to help refine a user’s writing, summarising and prioritising notifications, and the ability to search for “almost anything in your photos and videos by simply describing it”.

“It’s all built on a foundation of privacy with on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, a groundbreaking new approach that extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud to protect users’ information. We are thrilled to bring the first set of Apple Intelligence features to users today, and this is just the beginning.”

The new MacBook Pros are available for pre-order for delivery from November 8.

Originally published as Apple unveils cheaper and faster MacBook Pro lineup, shaving as much as $300 off