Forget the new MacBook Pro, Apple has something much better

Update on October 20th with details on the release of Apple Intelligence.

Apple is preparation the next generation of MacBooks and it will make a big deal ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season that your next PC should be a MacBook Pro. No doubt they will mention that they were designed “from the ground up” to use Apple Intelligence. But the real question consumers should be thinking about isn’t which MacBook Pro to buy. It’s whether they should be considering a MacBook Pro in the first place.

Later this month, Apple is expected to release three new powerful MacBooks—the M4-powered MacBook Pro, the M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and the M4 Max MacBook Pro—before they hit the market in the first week of November. These will import the new M4 Apple Silicon chipset on the Mac platform—although Apple made the odd decision to debut the chipset in May inside iPad Pro.

The focus will remain on the MacBook Pro brand and consumers will be presented with a classic Apple choice of three processors of different performance.

There is an audience that needs a significant level of computing power in their lives, and many in that audience need it in the portable form of a laptop. For everyone else, the best answer is the lighter and more affordable MacBook Air.

Astute people will note that Apple is not expected to launch an M4-powered MacBook Air at the upcoming event. Instead, those looking for a new laptop this holiday season will be pushed toward the consumer-focused MacBook Pro with the entry-level M4 chipset.

Update: Sunday, October 20: Writing for the Power On newsletterMark Gurman highlights how far behind Apple is in its AI efforts. The launch of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro devices in September put a huge emphasis on the company’s AI efforts that came together under the curious title Apple Intelligence. The latest iPad Mini was released last week with a press release, and the upgraded chipset is designed to support Apple Intelligence.

Neither iOS nor iPadOS have Apple intelligence available. Customers will have to wait until the week of Halloween before they can download any of the Apple Intelligence software. Even then, it will only be a small taste of Apple Intelligence as it is forced to roll out gradually.

When the MacBook Pro laptops are released, they will also lean heavily on AI, but as with the iPhone and iPad, Apple’s first pass at Generative AI won’t be fully available until March 2025. As pointed out by Gurman, Apple is pushing artificial intelligence to be the next big revolution. However, it is years behind the competition, “In fact, some at Apple believe that genetic AI technology – at least, so far – is more than two years behind the industry leaders.”

As Apple Intelligence won’t fully arrive until March, there’s no way to directly compare Apple’s system to the one on Windows 11. Anyone buying a MacBook Pro will be deciding, in part, on the strength of what they may or may not release. Apple in March.

Anyone making this decision should know that the M4 Pro and M4 Max will be superior for the average consumer. And while the M4 MacBook Pro might seem like the best choice, the actual laptop is a curiosity. Since every MacBook Pro with a vanilla M-series chipset is built around the MacBook Air’s chassis—essentially adding a fan to help cool the M-series chipset to get a few more percentage units of power out of it—you’ve got a laptop which is clumsily stuck in the middle of the portfolio.

If you want the power, then of course you’ll look higher in the portfolio and a few hundred dollars extra will pay off over the life of the laptop.

If you’re price conscious, then the MacBook Air is where you want to look. In years past, there was a distinct feeling that a lower-priced laptop would be far less capable, and anything more than light office work wouldn’t be possible on a company’s entry-level laptop.

That changed for Apple’s portfolio when it moved away from x86-based Intel chipsets to its own Apple Silicon chip line. Performance advantages in computing power, battery life, and thermal control redefined the MacBook to the point where even the M1 MacBook Air outperformed Windows laptops selling for twice the price.

The argument that you couldn’t perform at base price no longer held true. This MacBook Air could easily hold its own against the competition’s best consumer-focused laptops. That’s arguably true today, considering Apple’s quixotic attempt to reclaim the lead in consumer genetic AI will work comfortably in this four-year-old MacBook.

If you’re one of the few who really need top-end power, then the M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro laptops are where they come into play. But advances made by Apple Silicon mean that even a basic Macbook Air will offer enough power and flexibility to pro-am content creators, developers and artists, while meeting the business needs of IT departments worldwide.

For those people, skip the upcoming MacBook Pro for the M4 MacBook Air. If your need is great and the purchase must be made now, I would seriously consider the current M3 MacBook Air.

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