Apple M4 Max official with incremental upgrades over the M3 Max

Apple has finally lifted the covers off its most powerful laptop chip this generation: the Apple M4 Max. Now, there's a possibility that it will stack two of these side-by-side and launch an M4 Extreme, but there's on evidence such a chip exists yet. For now, those on the prowl for a high-performance Apple chip will find the M4 Max to their liking.

Like the Apple M4 Pro unveiled yesterday, the Apple M4 Max comes in two flavours, one with a 14-core CPU + 32-core GPU and the other with a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU. The latter features 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. It supports up to 128 GB of 'unified' memory with a total bandwidth of 546 GB/s, twice of what the Apple M4 Pro offers. Specs-wise, not much has changed compared to the M3 Max, which sports an identical configuration.

Apple claims the M4 Max's 40-core GPU is up to 1.9x faster than an M1 Max and 2.5x faster than an 'AI PC chip', which, upon further inspection, is Intel's Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V. Of course, this is a first-party marketing claim and should be treated as such until it is tested in the real world. Other Apple M4 Max specs include two ProRes accelerators, Thunderbolt 5.0 support and support for Apple Intelligence.

Currently, the M4 Max can only be purchased alongside the new MacBook Pro. The 14-inch variant is limited to the 14-core variant. If you want the full M4 Max experience with 16 CPU and 40 GPU cores, you'll need to purchase a 16-inch version.