Alleged M4 MacBook Pro Unboxing Video Reveals These Four Upgrades

M1 -> M2: 2301 -> 2598 = 12.91% increase

M2 -> M3: 2598 -> 3082 = 18.63% increase

M3 -> M4: 3082 -> 3864 = 25.37% increase

Assuming the M4 Geekbench score is legit, it’s interesting to see that the jump from M3 to M4 has the largest percentage increase in single-core performance since the M1 came out. The M1 -> M2 and M2 -> M3 upgrades were solid, but the 25.37% jump from M3 -> M4 is much more significant. It makes you wonder if we’ll keep seeing even bigger performance leaps with future releases, or if there’s something specific about this generation that’s driving such a large gain. Will Apple keep increasing performance at this rate, or is this an exception?

The box is distinctly for an M3 MacBook Pro from the design. Apple has a different screen on each version and the M3 had the black/grey pipes design features in the video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/17g3xh0/leaked_m...

Did Apple reuse the graphics on M4? I suspect not.

Is this a review unit that was released early with unofficial packaging? I didn’t realize Apple did that?

> 25% faster M4 chip: The box lists this 14-inch MacBook Pro as having an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU, whereas the current model has the M3 chip with an 8-core CPU. An alleged Geekbench 6 benchmark result shared by the YouTube channel behind this leak suggests that the M4 chip will be up to 25% faster than the M3 chip. Apple already introduced the M4 chip in the iPad Pro in May, and it indeed has up to a 10-core CPU and up to 25% faster performance compared to the M3 chip.

> 16GB of RAM: It was previously rumored that 16GB of RAM could become the minimum for all future Macs, and the alleged packaging indeed suggests that the next 14-inch MacBook Pro would start with 16GB of RAM, unless it is somehow a built-to-order configuration that will be offered on Apple's online store.

> Three Thunderbolt 4 ports: The box suggests the base 14-inch MacBook Pro will have three Thunderbolt 4 ports, up from two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the current model.

> Space Black: The box suggests that Space Black would become a color option for the base 14-inch MacBook Pro, whereas it is currently exclusive to models configured with the M3 Pro or M3 Max chip.

Aside, I still have an M1 Pro 16", is it worth upgrading to an M3 (or future M4)? It feels like my M1 can still do everything I need it to (coding, compiling, running emulators for mobile development), but for those that did upgrade, do you feel it was worth it, or are the gains incremental?

Assuming this is real, I can't help but think this could push Apple to accelerate their reduction on Chinese production. Is there any other realistic way this could have leaked other than through a Chinese backdoor?

Are these being made at Quanta or Foxconn? Since the start of the war, there has been a massive increase in sanction evasion through China and Central Asia. I would have to assume Valentin used a connection that has formed over the past 2 years in order to get a North American SKU as Russia's richest YouTube blogger

I have one gripe with these awesome machines, the cpu core scheduling. As part of developing our application we run benchmarks. Now every so often we get strange performance dips that I can only attribute to either or both the load generation process or the application process temporarily being scheduled on an efficiency core.

On macOS native there would be profilers I could use to at least detect it. But when using docker that gets all smudged into a single vm process.

Does anyone know how to detect this? Or better prevent? The only way I found is making a development kernel build to switch the boot core to a performance core and then disable all efficiency core. This is not practical on company hardware.

Man, the sanctions against Russia really aren't working. They're even getting US technology before it's released to Americans!

Reminds me a bit of those blurry photos of fake iProducts ca. 2005, taken in a blue elevator or loading dock. Anyone remember those?

I guess Thunderbolt 5 will have to wait until M5.

I just want to know max RAM configuration in the laptop form factor, and the memory bandwidth. I would like more than 800Gb/s memory bandwidth

My M1 Max can do everything I want it to, although it maxes out at 64gb RAM. but my use cases expand above 128gb and would change my approach

specifically would allow my machine to act as nodes on more distributed networks, maybe even Solana, and run larger language models - at all and faster

In my case going from M2 to M3 with more RAM (from 16 GB to 36 GB) will give me a greater performance increase than going from M2 to M4 both with 16 GB.

My question is - how does a Russian guy get his hands on an unreleased Apple product?

Smuggled out of a factory?

I would have guessed Apple had security locked down tight for new products. I know it's China, but usually dangling "Apple will punish you by pulled future products" is enough incentive.

I'm sure the next MacBook Pro won't have a notch. This was a stupid design decision and was only done to align with the "distinctive" notch of the iPhone. Now that this is gone, I'm sure the next the MacBook Pro will have the same dynamic island thing.

Still using an Intel MacBook Pro. Time for an M3 or wait for M4?

I was hoping Apple would get into TB5 for the M4 Macs.

I feel like we can say this is not real, I'm leaning in that direction, Apple would rarely launch a new laptop without changing the background image, each new one gets a new wallpaper. It's a core part of making the laptop look new in their marketing and on the boxes.

“Space black” is considered an upgrade nowadays?

I want to know its bandwidth. How does it compare to Nvidia 4090? If it exceeds that (at least in the Max/Ultra model), it'll be huge; we'll suddenly have solid +190GB of VRAM (technically URAM) to run multiple LLMs on.