New Macs Make the Move to M4

Apple has officially announced its latest hardware lineup: new Mac Minis, MacBooks, and iMacs are on the way, and all are more powerful, come with more memory, and will come equipped with Apple Intelligence. 

Powering these new computers is Apple’s M4 family of chips. The newly announced M4 Pro and M4 Max add more cores to the M4 10-core CPU. Pro chips make use of 14 cores while the Max uses 16. These powerful chips improve the speed and memory bandwidth of the M4 chip and offer big speed boosts over the previous lines of M chips from Apple. They also come with the 16-core Neural Engine for machine learning. 

Here’s everything else Apple revealed this week. 

Mac mini

Apple continues to pack a lot of computer in a small package with the Mac mini. Starting at $599, the new Mac Mini continues its minimalistic form factor, measuring at an adorable 5 x 5 inches. 

The mini has the M4 chip with its 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU as well as 16GB of RAM, which is a new standard for memory in this Mac lineup. With the new processor, the latest Mac mini can calculate 4x faster on Microsoft Excel and perform 13.3x faster in World of Warcraft: The War Within than the Mac mini with non-Mac chips. 

It also incorporates three ports for Thunderbolt 4 to go along with two USB-C ports and 256GB of SSD storage. Going up to the M4 Pro version of the Mac mini and memory jumps to 64GB, 512GB SSD, and the new Thunderbolt 5 ports for a faster transfer speed of up to 120 Gb/s. The Mac mini is also Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac. 

iMacs

The Apple iMac has a new colorful look with more color options including green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, and blue to go along with the traditional silver. The all-in-one iMac features a 24” 4.5K Retina display and is powered by an eight-core M4 chip with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage.

With the new M4 chip, the iMac can go up to 2x higher frame rate when gaming, 1.5x faster browsing on Safari, and 2.1x faster photo and editing performance of the iMac with M1. It’s also 4.5x faster than the 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest non-Apple processor and 6x faster than the most popular non-Apple based iMac model. 

Power and RAM weren’t the only upgrades in the new iMacs. The computer has a 12 megapixel front camera that works with Center State and Desk View. 

Macbook Pro

Apple’s MacBook Pro line of laptops also received some big upgrades. The 14-inch Macbook Pro has the M4 chip featuring a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, making it 1.8 faster at editing than the 13-inch Macbook Pro with M1. It comes with 16GB of RAM, the 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, 512GB of SSD storage, hardware accelerated ray tracing, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, the MagSafe 3 port, and a USB-C port. The base model also has the option for the Space Black color, which was previously only available on higher-end models. According to Apple, the new Macbook Pro has up to 22 hours of battery life with the 14-inch display and 24 hours of battery life with the 16-inch display. 

The MacBook Pro with M4 Pro chip is a step up in power with its 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU making it 3x faster than the M1 Pro. This step-up will also include 24GB of memory, 512GB SSD storage, and three Thunderbolt 5 ports. 

Then for those who want the most powerful laptop Apple offers, there’s the M4 Max MacBook Pro. These come with the M4 Max chip with a 14-core CPU and 32-core GPU, 36GB of memory, and 1TB of SSD storage. It can perform heavy creative tasks such as 3D animation and film scoring 3.5 faster than an M1 Max chip. 

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