November 17, 2024
Don’t miss the huge Black Friday sales on the new M4 (and even better closeout deals on remaining M3 inventory) offering up to $600 off a wide range of options:
I just upgraded to the new M4 MAX MacBook Pro (MBP). That’s a significant cost given it’s replacing an M3 MAX MBP I bought only one year ago. But as the center of my art and business, I consider it a worthy upgrade (especially given my productivity affects my income and the net loss on upgrade costs is somewhat offset with tax considerations). Not many photographers should feel the need to upgrade from the M3 (or even M1) to this new laptop. But I think this is a notable launch for a few reasons: it pushes the bounds for extreme users, has some great display updates, and will ensure more people can afford the excellent older M1-M3 computers (new or used).
See my recommendations below for good, better (14″ or 16″), and best (14″ or 16″)options for most photographers.
What’s new and notable in the M4 MacBook Pro?
Before we discuss what’s new, I think it’s important to consider just how unique the 14-16″ Apple Silicon MacBook Pros are. All of them (all the way back to M1) offer:
- The best laptop display for photographers:
- I do not say this lightly, there is simply no other laptop on the market which offers a comparable experience.
- Best-in-class HDR displays.
- Extremely high color accuracy (calibration is optional for most users with these displays).
- Outstanding performance and battery life.
- Apple Silicon is a major advantage. These laptops run for a long time, with almost no fan noise, and no need for bulky chargers.
- While SnapDragon X Elite chips look very promising for the future, there simply is not enough support for Windows on ARM software yet (for example, you cannot run any UXP plugins in Photoshop on WinARM).
- Very high quality. These laptops look great, they’re tough, and the keyboard and trackpad feel great to use.
The M4 MacBook Pro raises the performance bar compared to the M3 series in several ways:
- M4 Max offers 20% CPU / GPU faster performance vs M3 Max.
- Much easier to see clearly when working near windows or outside thanks to:
- SDR brightness can now be raised to 1000-nits (vs the previous 500 for M1/M2 or 600 for M3).
- A new nano-texture display option to cut down on glare.
- Less fan noise (they were already rare, but run even less often now)
- Upgraded web cam to support “center stage” and better results in challenging lighting conditions.
- Thunderbolt 5 to support 3x faster external devices (on the Pro and Max models)
- Memory bandwidth has increased by 20-75% (up to a max of 546 GB/s vs a previous max of 400)
- Battery life on the base and Pro versions has been increased by 2-4 hours (up to 24 hours total).
- Note that the 14″ Max version is the same and the 16″ Max actually decreased by 1 hour.
- Minimum specs have been significantly improved for the base model.
- Minimum RAM has been increased to 16GB (at no extra cost!)
- Even the base model now supports at least 2 external monitors (even when the laptop lid is open to see three screens total).
The gains here are iterative over the M3, but this is a larger generational leap than in previous years given the display and other updates on top of the performance improvements. This helps to solidify the MacBook Pro’s position as what I consider to already be the best laptop for photographers. I’m historically pretty agnostic on the Apple vs PC debate – but after trying a wide range of computers over the past year, I believe Apple has a notable edge in laptops for photography use. They feature a best-in-class HDR display, optimal performance / battery life, and excellent overall quality.
M4 MAX display:
Apple has the best laptop displays I’ve ever seen, and I have tested dozens of them in the past year. Their gorgeous HDR displays and high color accuracy are in a class of their own. I have never experienced another laptop display that’s on par with Apple’s. And now the M4 display has been updated and is significantly improved even over the M3. The display is much easier to see for productivity work in bright environments.
There are a few notable changes in the M4 display:
- Nan0-texture display (optional for $150)
- Increased peak SDR brightness (this is a software change, but likely enabled by improved efficiency with the QD film).
- The display apparently changed from a red KSF phospher film to QD (quantum dot).
- The color is a bit different than the prior displays.
That’s rather technical, and we’ll step through each of those changes below. But if you want to know the bottom line, it’s this: the M4 offers a vastly better display for working in bright ambient light. The other changes will grab the attention of color nerds, but shouldn’t affect most photographers.
The new nano-texture display is very nice. It significantly cuts glare from strong lights behind you, which makes it much easier to read text or enjoy photographs. The image quality is excellent under both bright and dark ambient light. The display is much easier to view with typical reflections. If you have a very powerful light source shining directly on the display, the nano-texture spreads it and it can actually be worse. But this is a terrible condition for either display and you should avoid things like letting the sun shine directly on the screen. Repositioning the display is the correct solution for those extreme scenarios. I see no downsides to this new option and think it is well worth a $150 upgrade to be able to more easily see the screen when working in the field, a coffee shop, etc. I expect this will be one of my favorite new features of the M4 over time.
The M4 now supports 1000 nits SDR (up from 600 nits in M3 and 500 nits in M1 / M2). This makes the display easier to see for productivity work in bright environments (this has no benefit for HDR as the display is still limited to 1600 nits peak brightness). The increased limit is not something you can set via slider nor a custom preset. Instead, it uses an elegant system to offer it automatically only when beneficial. The 1000 nits SDR brightness is allowed when all the following are true:
- The ambient light sensor detects a bright environment (this is located right next to the web cam)
- “automatically adjust brightness” is enabled in System Settings / Display
- The brightness slider is set to the maximum.
To be clear, you cannot achieve 1000 nits by manually sliding to the max brightness if the automatic option is not enabled (personally, I believe setting the slider to maximum should always allow automatic use of 600-1000 nits based on ambient light, as the reasons for using a fixed brightness don’t apply when you’re pushing to the max and the limit is so far above any reasonable reference viewing condition). For those of you who are familiar with HDR, the headroom will be 1.4 stops if you set the slider to the max without auto (this implies ~600 nits SDR for a display that can achieve 1600 nits). If you turn on auto and have the brightness slider to the max, then HDR headroom will be somewhere between 0.7 to 2.0 stops depending on the level of ambient light (implying SDR luminance ranges from 400 to 1000 nits under auto when you push the slider to the max). In other words, when you enable auto brightness, the SDR white luminance is allowed to move within a moving range which is based on the brightness slider. I would recommend you enable the automatic brightness. Then if you need to target a fixed value for controlled / reference viewing, use a custom profile (for example 80-120 nits would often be ideal for critical photography work). You can create a custom profile under System Settings / Display at the bottom of the “preset” dropdown.
The change to a quantum dot (QD) film for the mini-LED display is not something I have seen documented by Apple, but it appears to be confirmed through testing by Ross Young. On that same post, note the comments from Blur Busters confirming that the M4 confirming benefits to pixel response time. If you view this test from Blur Busters and try to follow the bars with your eyes, you will see a cyan shift on the M3 whereas the M4 shows the white bars remaining neutral. The color shift in fast content on the old display is a result of red / green / blue sub-pixels not getting brighter / darker at the same rate. The new display offers better motion response and eliminates this cyan “flash”. Most people probably won’t notice this difference, but the new display is improved. Assuming that this all confirms the use of quantum dot technology, this likely implies improved efficiency and probably helped Apple enable the new 1000 nit SDR. The wider spectrum of the red sub-pixel may also reduce “observer metamerism” (ie the risk that difference people perceive color on the display differently when the red/green/blue colors are very narrow).
The color accuracy out of the box for the M4 is great, as has been the case with all recent Apple displays. But that does not mean perfect nor identical to other Apple displays. My M4 shows a slight but visible / measurable red bias in grey values, while my M3 shows a comparable bias towards green. This is just a sample size of two and could be variability within spec, but I suspect that the reason is more likely the new quantum dot film and it’s resulting impact to the “power spectral distribution” (PSD) of the display. It’s possible that the difference here is due to metameric failure (ie, the different spectral emission may not allow perfect matching). If anything, I expect the M4 is now more accurate as the peaky reds of the older displays are not ideal (probably more prone to metamerism). I don’t know and don’t have a spectro to confirm (which would be ideal to make both displays as accurate as possible). The changes here may affect the accuracy of profiling with a colorimeter (because such a device has to assume the PSD), so you may wish to contact your vendor to see if you need a software update from them for your colorimeter.
M4 MAX test results:
All my test results are a direct comparison of the fully-loaded 14″ M4 Max to the fully-loaded 14″ M3 Max.
Photoshop test results:
My G-Bench Photoshop benchmarking software is meant to evaluate performance on Photoshop tasks relevant for photographers. The time required to complete key tasks is weighted based on the estimated likelihood a photographer would use it. In other words, it’s meant to give you a reasonable way to compare how fast Photoshop would feel subjectively for a photographer.
The M4 Max achieved a weighted score of 34. That’s roughly 18% faster than the comparable M3 MAX (and roughly 40% faster than the M1 MAX). Note that my previous testing of the M3 Max showed a score of 44, whereas it is now down to 41.4. It has actually improved over the past year due to improvements in Photoshop itself.
The most significant gains in terms of total time were in opening images, smart objects, creating new adjustment layers (very helpful for actions/panels), and various blurs. The total test time (without weighting) decreased by 30 seconds (from 3:16 to 2:46). The most significant benefits here are for those who handle a lot of batch processing, large images, and smart objects.
I additionally tested Topaz Gigapixel, which ran 32% faster on the M4 (1:14 vs 1:38).
Lightoom test results:
Importing and exporting show the most benefit under the M4, which is consistent with the gains being related to writing data or tasks which are intensive on the CPU:
- importing RAW or DNG filess was 16% faster on M4. (unlike my prior M3 vs M2 testing, I did not see a big difference)
- exporting JPG was 27% faster on M4.
- Applying AI Denoise was 7% faster on the M4 (27:30 vs 29:38 for 65 Nikon Z7ii images).
- During the denoise test, the M3 fans kicked in sooner and continued to be significantly noisy for 5 minutes longer, so the M4 avoided 6+ minutes of significant fan noise.
- exporting lossy DNG was actually 12% slower. I can’t think of a clear reason for the poor DNG results and suspect their may be room for the M4 to improve here with future software updates from Apple and/or Adobe (which might mean some of the advantages grow larger).
Video test results:
I did some very limited testing with video export and found mixed results for rendering 12-19 minute videos.
- FCPX 11 was 40% faster when exporting as 12-minute movie as ProRes 4444 XQ (39 vs 65s) and 13% faster when exporting the same move as H.264 (66 vs 76s).
- Handbrake was 13% faster, saving 29 seconds when exporting a 16-minute video (3:21 vs 3:50).
- Screenflow was 8% faster, which saves 55 seconds exporting a roughly 15-minute video (11:11 vs 12:06).
Other test results:
Beyond this, I generally found about a 10-20% benefit for various tasks which are CPU intensive (GPU-intensive tasks show little benefit in my testing of current versions of software use for photography and video).
- My build tasks for creating my Photoshop plugins were 12% faster.
- Compressing 900 images into a ZIP was 10% faster (saving 31 seconds, 4:56 vs 5:27).
- BlackMagic Design’s disk speed test showed write speeds were about 5% faster: 8300 MB/s write and 5750 read on the M4 vs 7900 and 5600 for the M3.
14″ vs 16″
I only have the 14″ to test. However, there are several good reports online about better cooling and reduced fan noise with the 16″. I think that is likely a benefit of the 16″. That said, I don’t think performance boosts / fan noise in relative rare and extreme scenarios is a key decision factor. If you want lightweight, small, or lower cost (especially for the minimum tier), the 14″ is likely still your best choice even if the 16″ might have some slight performance benefits.
Conclusions:
- I highly recommend any of the M1-M4 14-16″ MacBook Pros for anyone using an Intel Mac laptop, PC laptop users interested in HDR, or anyone making the switch from desktop to laptop. Getting a used, refurb, or closeout stock of the M2 are all very attractive ways to get the best possible value.
- These improvements make the best laptop for photography even better. I don’t say that lightly – I try to remain technology agnostic, but I believe the advantages of Apple Silicon and the XDR display offer clear and objective benefits for those focused primarily on photography.
- The key highlights are significant improvements to performance across a wide range of applications, a much better display for working in challenging light (which is very common for landscape photographers), and significantly less fan noise.
- While the M1 remains a great laptop, the M4 is getting close to the point where it cuts the time of many tasks in half. They’re both fast, but the M4 is blazing fast.
- There are clear gains over the M2 and M3 as well, but probably not enough for many photographers to consider an early upgrade.
The M4 MacBook Pro is likely to be a compelling upgrade if:
- You own any computer other than an M1 or later 14-16″ MacBook Pro. The HDR (XDR) display alone is worth an upgrade if you don’t already own one of its predecessors, it is in a class of its own. And the performance is stunning compared to anything before the M1.
- You are upgrading not just from M2 or M3, but also increasing specs (such as bumping the CPU or storage).
- You frequently work in bright environments where you will appreciate the nano-texture and brighter display.
See my prior reviews of the M1, M2, and M3 Max.
Recommended configurations for photographers:
I recommend the 14″ laptop for lightweight travel (ideally with an external monitor at home). The 16″ display offers valuable room for toolbars and such and is highly recommended if you won’t travel with it much, don’t use an external monitor, or want a larger HDR display (as options for external HDR monitors are currently limited/pricy).
Most photographers can use a fairly basic CPU option, but should get 16-32GB of RAM and target internal storage twice as large as the data you currently store to ensure room for growth. Apple has created a fairly complex set of feature dependencies (likely to help encourage some upgrades and manage logistics/cost). So it helps to take your time to look through the details.
A few key things to consider:
- Test your CPU / GPU / SSD to know where your bottlenecks likely are, as this is where upgrades will give you the most benefit. Don’t guess – Apple has done a masterful job of tying certain upgrades to others (from a business perspective, their price segmentation is almost as impressive as the product – they clearly know how to encourage people to make bigger upgrades than they otherwise would have).
- Storage is the best place to cut cost: it is the most expensive option and the only upgrade you can make after purchase. See suggested external SSDs below.
- The nano-texture display is also worth considering for any of these tiers if you are likely to work in a bright environment.
- The 16″ display offers a huge boost in usable screen and is definitely worth the upgrade if you’re buying into at least the Pro M4 level. However, the 14″ is much lighter and is probably best regardless of your budget if you travel much or hike with your laptop. The 14″ display is also the only option if you don’t wish to upgrade to at least the Pro chip.
- The most useful upgrades are a minimum 24GB RAM and the nano-texture.
- RAM is one of the cheaper upgrades and likely to offer pretty good gains up to 36GB (beyond which the returns are smaller and depend on your usage).
- Unless you do a lot of video or massive import/export jobs with LR, you can easily skip upgrades to the number of CPUs / GPUs.
Here are the options I think make the most sense for photographers:
- Good (budget-conscious): 14″ 10-core M4 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD for $1749 (there is no 16″ version with the base M4 chip, you’ll have to jump to the “better” category for a larger screen)
- This offers a fast, high-quality computer with an outstanding HDR display. 16GB is the minimum RAM a photographer should purchase.
- An upgrade to 24GB may a valuable upgrade in the long run as you’ll likely get more years out of it and/or be able to recoup some of that cost when you sell it later.
- You could save even more with 512GB storage, but you’ll be very dependent on external drives for storage.
- Alternatively, the remaining new M3 inventory should be available at great prices, and there will surely be many great deals on older used models.
- Better (ideal for photography): base M4 Pro with 24GB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2,199 ($2,699 for the 16″ version).
- The Pro CPU offers an extra Thunderbolt port over the base model and is required if you want a 16″ screen.
- An upgrade to 48GB RAM is certainly worth considering (and probably offers more benefit than the upgraded Pro CPU / GPU options for Photoshop).
- Best (for heavy Lightroom import/export, serious video work, or if money is no object): M4 Max, 48GB, 2TB for $4,099 ($4,399 for the 16″ version)
- If you are buying the 14″ model, you will have to upgrade the CPU / GPU to go beyond 36GB of RAM. That sufficient for most photographers, but 48-64GB will benefit heavy users.
- If you are buying the 16″ model, you might consider the 36 GB RAM and lesser CPU / GPU option for $3,899.
I went all in on the fully-loaded 14″ MacBook Pro, and particularly appreciate the large internal storage (I’m already using over 6TB, with another 13TB on an external RAID). The only option I skipped is the 16″ screen. I have a Pro Display XDR monitor for my HDR work and prefer the lightweight 14″ model for travel.
I recommend the following options to compliment the laptop:
- External SSD drives
- Internal storage is convenient – but this is much cheaper and a good way to expand if needed down the road.
- USB SSD’s I personally use and recommend:
- Sandisk Extreme Portable for up to 4TB. Very fast / compact and connects with a single cable. I find this is a great option for backing up the computer, or adding more storage if you don’t have enough internal to the laptop (always be sure to backup your drives).
- Samsung T5 EVO 8TB. I’ve only had mine for a few weeks, but it is working great.
- Vectotech 8TB. I have three of these and have used them for a long time without issue. They were my top pick for large storage before the price on the Samsung recently dropped.
- A Thunderbolt drive should be much faster than USB, but at a higher cost. As I have ample internal storage, I have personally opted for cheaper USB drives and have limited experience with the common Thunderbolt models. Also given cost, most of them have limited reviews. So it is hard to comment on reliability and performance. If you are going to use one as primary storage because you buy a laptop with a small drive, I think this is well worth considering (and you should have a robust backup strategy for any external drive, as likely all of them will be less reliable than the internal Apple SSD). So while I have not tested it personally, the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD has a large number of positive reviews.
- CalDigit TS4 dock. This makes it very easy to plug your laptop into everything with a single cable (which includes power for the laptop and data connections to monitor, hard drives, Ethernet, mouse, etc). It includes two downstream Thunderbolt ports, which I find very handy so that I can turn off my RAID drive without losing access to downstream devices. I owned the previous TS3 and it’s also a great option if you don’t care about multiple downstream TB ports.
- An external HDR monitor. This is optional, but nice if you also want a larger HDR display to complement the outstanding one built into the MacBook Pro.
Should you consider the new M4 Mini? The only benefit is lower cost. If we compare my “good” laptop option above to the comparable M4 Mini (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD), you will save a maximum of $750. I say maximum because you may still need to buy a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers to use it. The extra cost of the laptop gives you a best in class HDR display and portability. If you do not care about either, then the Mini is a great value. And if you are eager for HDR, you can pick up one of these great recommended 42″ TVs for HDR for less than $1000. So it depends on your needs, but I many photographers would benefit significantly from the laptop.
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