CheckMag | Buying a MacBook Pro right now might be a grave mistake - here's why
Apple's MacBook Pro lineup needs no introduction for anyone familiar with high-end laptops. Ever since the advantages of Apple Silicon have embraced the MacBook Pro, the laptop lineup has cemented its dominance in the realm of performance notebooks, with little else on the market that is capable of dethroning its reign in terms of performance and efficiency.
As of right now, we are currently in the 3rd generation of the Apple Silicon M-series SoCs found in the MacBook Pro. Starting with the M2 Pro and M2 Max which followed the M1 Pro and M1 Max, we have received healthy performance gains year-over-year, but none of them so far has been significant enough to warrant an annual upgrade cycle, which is only to be expected from a multi-thousand-dollar laptop.
With the M3 Max, Apple gave a tremendous boost to the performance of the Max variant, which sports not only a larger GPU but also a much faster CPU thanks to a higher core count. These changes made the M3 Max almost 65% faster than the M2 Max in CPU performance. The M3 Pro, however, received a smaller boost, being only around 5-10% faster than the M2 Pro in multi-core benchmark scores despite the much-improved single-core scores. This was mostly because of the lower number of performance cores found in the M3 Pro, coming in at just six instead of the eight found in the M2 Pro.
Now, of course, very little is known regarding what Apple has in store for the M4 Pro and M4 Max SoCs which are expected to arrive later this year, although the vanilla M4 introduced with the OLED iPad Pro (currently $899 on Amazon) rocked decent improvements over the M3. Will Apple give the M4 Pro a bigger boost compared to what the M3 Pro received? That is not known, but neither is it unlikely, considering Apple Intelligence will be a major selling point for the upcoming MacBook Pro lineup, which will likely necessitate a healthy performance boost.
Moreover, perhaps the biggest reason to hold off on purchasing a new base model MacBook Pro would be the amount of memory that Apple offers. It is unequivocally absurd for a laptop sporting a 'Pro' moniker to be shipped with just 8 GB of memory, a massive drawback that is compounded by Apple's immorally high memory upgrade prices. No matter what Apple's marketing executives may claim, 8 GB of memory is far from adequate for most Pro-workflows and offers no future-proofing whatsoever, keeping in mind that Apple's unified memory is not user-upgradeable.
However, recent rumors by prominent analysts have pointed out that Apple may indeed be planning a bump in memory for its upcoming Macs, which are expected to boast 16 GB instead of the 8 GB that Apple has been offering in its base variant Macs for what seems like an eternity at this point. For folks who are not in the know and end up settling for the base variant of any Mac, this would easily be the most consumer-friendly behavior Apple has demonstrated in years, a far cry from its usual practice of nickel-and-diming its most loyal customers.
In light of all this, anyone planning to purchase a new MacBook Pro in the coming months would do well to just hold their horses for a few more weeks. After years of incremental upgrades, we can finally expect a larger bump in performance, owing to the increased performance requirements of Apple Intelligence. Moreover, the likelihood of scoring twice the memory in base variant Macs seems to be pretty high, which alone would make the entry-level models far better suited for long-term use, while giving consumers more bang for their buck than we've seen in years.
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