A passionate defense of the M Pro series of chips
On the latest episode of ATP, a show I should mention that I really love, they discussed the possibility of Apple discontinuing the Pro series in their M lineup of Apple silicon chips. One of the main arguments, which I think Marco leaned into the most, was that the performance uplift on the Pro chips isn’t significant, and therefore most people probably bought the baseline MacBook Pro or they splashed out on the Max models to get MAXIMUM POWER.
Hello, it's me! I'm a Pro buyer, I love them, and I would be very sad if they bit the dust.
Today I wanted to defend the M4 Pro’s performance, which I think is absolutely closer to the Max than the normal M4.
But before I get into performance, let’s talk about pricing.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the base chip starts at $1,599, the first M4 Pro configuration costs $1,999, while the M4 Max starts at $3,199. As the line currently sits, going from the M4 (or M5 at this odd time in the lineup) to an M4 Max could double the base price of the machine. The Max is an unbelievably expensive computer, and that's before you start adding more RAM or SSD space.
Bu let's get onto those performance gains, which are very real. I pulled some Geekbench 6 numbers for the 14-inch MacBook Pro specifically, since that’s the model where you can actually configure all three chip tiers, and the M4 Pro puts up a strong showing. Let's skip over single-core performance since they're all pretty similar here. Let's get on to the multi-core and graphics performance.
On the CPU side, the base M4 scores 14,886 in Geekbench’s multi-core test. The entry-level M4 Pro (12 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores) jumps to 20,286, which is a 36% improvement. Step up to the higher-end M4 Pro (14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores) and you’re at 22,413, a 51% gain over the base chip. That's a genuinely meaningful jump in performance over the base M4. For what it's worth, it's also a 15% gap to the M5.
Then there's that higher-end M4 Pro, which I personally own and scores 22,413, while the base M4 Max (14 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores) scores 23,053. That’s less than a 3% difference between the two, but it cost my $900 less than that M4 Max model.
The GPU story is where the Max really starts to pull away, and that makes sense given the core count difference. On Geekbench’s Metal test, the base M4 scores 57,366. The entry M4 Pro nearly doubles that at 98,960, and the higher-end M4 Pro hits 112,154. The M4 Max configurations jump to 158,399 and 186,615 respectively. So yes, if you’re doing heavy GPU work, the Max experiences higher highs than the Pro chip, but the M4 Pro is still delivering roughly 2x the GPU performance of the base M4, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I wanted to make this case because I think the Pro lineup has been genuinely valuable in every generation of Apple silicon (the M3 line was a bit weird, though, I'll give you that). It’s a sweet middle ground for people who need more performance, better external display support, and more RAM and storage options, but can’t justify spending $3-4,000 on a laptop. It fills a real gap in the market that would be painful to lose, in my opinion.
If Apple does discontinue the Pro line of chips, I expect they would simply offer a slightly downgraded M5 Max that performs similarly to the current M4 Pro relative to its M5 siblings. Given the performance graphs above, it feels like that's what the M4 Pro already is in the lineup, so if the price is the same as it is now, then I've got no beef with the change if it happens. You will get Salty Matt if they have a $1,600 chasm between the normal MacBook Pro and the Max version, though.
