This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s Mac report card here.

MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro continues to get a relentless stream of updates, as the only Mac in Apple’s lineup that’s gotten new version for every single generation of Apple silicon so far, and 2024 saw a pretty great update to the line. The base M4 version of the product felt more aligned with the rest of the Pros by getting more ports and better monitor support. The M4 Pro chip was a wonderful bounce back from the M3 Pro’s near regression over the M2 Pro, and the M4 Max continues to be an absolute beast in laptop form factor.

Oh, and the base RAM jumped from 8GB to 16GB on the base model, and to 24GB on the Pro and Max models.

And battery life improved by about 20%.

And the webcam got an upgrade.

Forgive my language here, but the MacBook Pros were really fucking good this year, and it’s not that big of a story because the MacBook Pros have been really fucking good every year since 2021 now so we’re just used to it.

MacBook Air

The MacBook Air has also been exceptionally good for years now, and the update to the M3 processor this year was a little more muted than the Pro updates, although there was a surprise update that made me really happy.

The M3 update in March was a pretty generic spec bump, with the M2 being swapped out for the faster M3, and that was basically it, every other spec remained the same (except the Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 6E for you wireless freaks ❤️).

The quiet, but exciting update that came later in the year was when Apple upgraded the base RAM on the Air from 8GB to 16GB. They didn’t make a big song and dance about it, they just stopped selling their 8GB models and lowered the price of all other Airs by $200 so you were getting more RAM for the same price. Good! The 8GB Stans out there will say most people don’t need more than that, but software is only getting bigger as time goes on, and we need more RAM to keep up with it. Some will tell you it’s just because of Apple Intelligence, and that’s surely a reason, but it’s also a simple fact that software across the board is using more resources than ever and computers need to keep advancing to keep up.

Mac mini

Seemingly the most blockbuster update of the year, we finally got that cuter, smaller form factor that cynics like me didn’t expect to happen yet and it was a major hit. Yes, the upgrades are quite pricey, but the base model is shockingly beefy and is a ton of computing power for $599. This is the Mac that most people don’t need, but many people are trying to find excuses to buy anyway.

iMac

Truthfully, I completely forgot the iMac existed and almost posted this with this section, but it is still kicking in 2024 and it's surely a very nice computer for a certain niche out there. It did get an update this year from the M3 to the M4 and the webcam got Center Stage, and that's about it. I do wish you could get one of these with a Pro chip like you can the mini, but that's not the end of the world.

Mac Studio

The M3 generation of Apple silicon was a weird one as the Ultra chip never came to pass, which meant there was no clear upgrade path for the Mac Studio. The Studio is a powerhouse, but it’s two generations behind most of the other Mac lines, so it’s really a tough sell in 2024.

Mac Pro

The story is exactly the same for the Mac Pro, which is also stranded on the M2 generation of chips. This was a profoundly weird computer when it debuted a few years ago, and now this computer starting at $7,000 feels like it’s built for effectively no one on planet Earth. This wasn’t a computer that went to toe-to-toe with the highest end PCs on the market last year, and that’s even more the case this year.

What I want in 2025

Getting the easy stuff out of the way, I hope we see the M4 Ultra released in 2025, bringing updates to Apple’s most expensive computers. it’s absurd that a $599 Mac mini is more performant at numerous tasks than these Macs that can easily cost 10x the money and they need to get off those M2 chips.

Meanwhile, that Mac mini is in great shape and likely won’t get touched in 2025. The iMac is also fine and likely won't get an update either.

On the laptop front, I expect relatively boring, but welcome upgrades to the Air and Pro lines. The Air will likely get a bump to the M4 chip and I’m not totally sure what will happen to the $999 model. as far as I see it, there are three possibilities:

1. The M2 model sticks around at that $999 price point with the M4 starting at $100 more just like today’s M3
2. The M2 model gets an M3 upgrade and keeps the $999 price tag
3. The base M4 model starts at $999 and all MacBook Airs ship with an M4

I can see arguments for all three of these coming to pass. I’d love it if they could hit that important $999 price point with the M4, simplifying the lineup, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For the MacBook Pro, I really think they’ve nailed this product line and we’ll get another “boring” spec bump with the M5 chip generation in October. I’d love to see the same style of OLED Apple put in the iPad Pro this year come to the MacBook Pro, but for whatever reason I get the impression Apple is happy enough with the current MacBook Pro screens and they’ll stick with it for at least 2025 and maybe longer.

A quick note on the Studio Display while we’re talking Mac things…I think this display is very long in the tooth and sports very pedestrian specs for one of the most expensive consumer monitors out there, but I also don’t expect this to get any upgrades in 2025. I’d love to see this get a ProMotion update with an OLED screen, but I wouldn’t count on it.

My last hope is a little vague, but I think we might start to get rumors of some new Mac from Apple that sits outside these 5 product lines that they have today. If you follow my work, you probably already know that I expect this to be more of a hybrid device similar to the Surface Pro. This new Mac will support touch and allow you to use it in a laptop, tablet, or desktop form factor just like an iPad. I think it will support the Apple Pencil and won’t require as many changes to macOS as people think it will to work great. I doubt we’ll actually see this released in 2025, but I think this future is inevitable and 2025 will be the year we start to see serious smoke in the rumor mill around this product.

How was the Mac in 2024?

I think the Mac lineup at the end of 2023 was about as good as the Mac lineup has ever been in the company’s history, so keep that high praise in mind when I say that I think 2024 was a subtle decline, but still great.

Laptops are the core of the Mac, and the MacBook Pro is in a stellar place and the MacBook Air is also very good, especially after it got its silent update to 16GB RAM standard late in the year.

I also think the Mac mini is a triumph, sporting maybe the best power-to-price and power-to-physical-size ratios in any desktop computers ever made. It’s so damn cute!

The only black marks on the Mac this year are their pro desktop computers which are languishing 2 generations behind the rest of the Mac lines, as well as the fact their portable Macs are still very old-fashioned clam shell-only products. They’re astoundingly good clam shells, but I do think Apple is going to need to evolve the Mac hardware at some point.

I also think it would be good to see repair-ability and user upgrades come back into the fold. We got a hint of this as the new Mac mini uses screw-in SSDs, something Apple fanboys said was impossible since soldering these to the SoC was required for the performance users demanded. Those SSDs in the mini aren’t really replaceable by normal people, and I know laptops are pretty closed systems, but I’d love to see Apple make their desktops more upgradeable and repairable by their users using off-the-shelf parts for RAM and storage.

Those minor issues aside, I think the Mac remains in a very strong spot as we close out 2024, and it’s a wild turnaround from where we were just 5 years ago when Macs were at one of their lowest points ever.