While the new M4 MacBook Pros got a number of sweet quality of life upgrades, the new MacBooks looked about the same externally, except for the M4 MacBook Pro gaining an additional Thunderbolt port over the M3 model, something that the M3 Pro/M3 Max models already had.

They were launched less than two months ago, they are outstanding products, and yet Amazon is offering substantial discounts on them.

The M4 represents as much of a philosophical shift as it does a performance upgrade. It is Apple acknowledging that if you’re buying a laptop with “Pro” in the name, than it should be a better machine.

I tested a beautiful Space Black MacBook Pro with the new M4 Pro chip and 48GB memory (which I would treasure if it belonged to me). The 3-nanometer chip it uses has 14 cores, consisting of 10 performance and four efficiency cores; it has a 2TB drive; a Liquid Retina XDR nanotexture display; and it costs $3,349.

The biggest reason to upgrade to the MacBook Pro M4 is the performance. This machine gets the newest M4 chip that is based on a 3-nanometer process, promising the fastest CPU core and better multithreaded performance than M3. Based on our testing, the M4 blows a lot of the competition away but not on every test.