It would be great, but unfortunately, I don't think so. They will want to get as much money as possible on upgrades.
12 -> 18 -> 24 is most likely.
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M4 MacBook Pro Models Expected to Launch in Late 2024
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12 -> 18 -> 24 is most likely.
Throw Baldur's Gate 3 on it.
My 2023 M2 Max was struggling already and the heat was enough to warm my whole house at night.
No point in purchasing / upgrade / upspec for what other users need, is it? Better off considering own individual needs (and preferences/desires).
this is what i'm considering. i have a 2011 pro. need an upgrade badly, esp. extra hd space, but really everything. 2011 is falling apart (one of the biggest pains is failed usb ports). gonna start shopping m1-m3.
The entry-level Pro should have been called MacBook instead, but its brand new and not an MacBook Air therefore making it irrelevant to the discussion of why enterprises didn’t historically consider the MacBook Air a business machine.
Well, my wife doesnt edit video. Neither does my mom. Nor my dad, or my cousins, nieces, nephews or most of my friends. In fact I’m the only one in my social circle who uses Final Cut Pro or even iMovie.
I have a family member in the UK who edits 2 minute projects for his business and sometimes video clips for his flying club (he’s a private pilot). But he’s happy with an M1 Air for these and wouldn’t really benefit from more powerful hardware for these projects.
Sure. Video editing is more mainstream than ever but I still regard it as fairly niche.
It really is.
Contrast improves significantly, which improves color and picture quality; and makes images “pop” or gives it a more 3D effect.
Viewing angle accuracy improves, so when looking at a display at an angle, the image doesn’t wash out.
No blooming, which is annoying on mini LED because it has inaccurate shadow detail and/or has to pull back highlights to preserve shadow detail; the image is inaccurate to the original image source in challenging scenes; or the blooming distracts like on subtitles or starfields.
The previous iPad Pros and current MacBook Pros with mini LED are lying about ProMotion 120Hz. The pixel response is too slow, like 5-10x too slow, to show 120 frames per second. OLED fixes that because it has a pixel response of less than 3ms so you’re actually seeing 120 frames per second.
The main worry with OLED is it wouldn’t get bright enough to match, tandem OLED surprisingly does; and that OLED would burn in, which tandem OLED in theory won’t.
Yep. I have a mini LED Macbook and iPad Pro and the double-layer OLED M4 iPad, and side by side you can easily see how much better the OLED screen is over the mini LED. If I had a choice between the two I would easily and without a doubt go for the double-layer OLED screen.
The main worry with OLED Macs is burn in of things like the Menubar and Dock since those are displayed for long periods of time; iPhones generally do not have their screen on for 8 hours a day. Apple does not have any burn in mitigation tricks with the iPads.
To add to your glowing testimonial:
I forgot to mention a core benefit is OLED allows devices to go thinner and lighter—heft of 13-inch iPad Pro, especially when coupled with Magic Keyboard, was the #1 complaint. My wifey has an M1 13-inch iPad Pro, and if I gifted her the M4 iPad Pro, she may not gasp at the improvement in picture quality but she will gasp at the thinner, lighter form factor because she hates how heavy the M1 iPad Pro is when coupled with Magic Keyboard—its like carrying a college textbook everywhere.
So the new MacBook Pro design in 2026 will see a thinner/lighter redesign thanks to both OLED and TSMC's 2nm N2 and N2P node (so M6 and M7-generation chips). That is something we should all look forward to assuming battery life and port selection remains unaffected.
It's fine and fair if a percentage of buyers aren't savvy or sensitive enough to care about the picture differences between mini LED and OLED—arguably differences are subtle. But Apple is doing right by all users when they make devices feel better in the hand (assuming battery life remains untouched—and correct me if I'm wrong but some people report M4 iPad Pro has even better battery life despite being thinner).
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Thats an understandable worry. The first OLED tablet was in 2011 and early OLED has burn-in issues.
The reason why Apple waited until 2024 is to use Tandem OLED, or Hybrid OLED, where manufacturers are stacking two layers of OLED on top of each other. This allows the device to half the voltage to each diode while increasing brightness and resilience to burn-in. Tandem OLED has been used in cars since 2019—since normal OLED can't get bright enough to fight sunlight coming into a car. Apple's manufacturing partners are confident.
That doesn't mean there won't be burn-in, but theoretically it would happen very far into the future, past the 10-year mark if at all. Generally, computer users don't surpass 500 nits in SDR mode (normal macOS work), so burn-in mitigation for things like the dock and menu bar perhaps aren't needed; although who knows what Apple will do, we'll have to wait to 2026 to find out.
Yep, people who actually work with it on the daily know how important making thinner and lighter is. I sure do.
I haven’t paid much attention to battery life, but if it was worse I would have already noticed.
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Yeah, I think the M4Max will be my next lappy top. M1Max is great, but with some of the latest codecs I am running into edit playback smoothness issues when fast forwarding and such. Normal speed is smooth as butter, but long form videos I like to double time and with multiclips it get jittery on my m1max. Granted I am playing back 5.8K 4:3 opengate video sooooo, non-standard resolutions. But correct me if I'm wrong, I have 2.8 GB/s SSD's, so throughput isn't the issue, I think its more than GPU that helps with interface playback...its also just raw core power as I think with the latest version of FCPX with the moving timeline that taxes the m1max's capabilities at anything faster than realtime playback. That is what I wonder is if playback is all handled by the built-in encoders, so I know with m3 it has the same hevc encoders so exports wouldn't improve much over my m1max, but if the gpu and cores contribute heavily to interface and editing playback then that might make the experience smoother? Hopefully m4 has more hevc/h.264 encoders on chip!
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They already have—Studio Display does 600 nits although you're right that MacBook Pro only does 500 nits SDR. My point is that generally indoors 250-500 nits is where people set their monitor; we don't have to worry about OLED getting burn in from 1000 nits sustained for 8-hours, or anything— it's only with HDR media viewing or outdoors where 1000+ nits is needed.
I know how you feel but I'm getting some money in soon. Only problem is, I have a really tough time coughing up $2k for an 15" M3 MBA with 24GB RAM (future proof). Even with the edu discount it's $1800. It's on sale now for $150 off and I'm debating it. The damn 15" MBA is just about as heavy as the 15" 2015 MBP. I want to try and get my fat fingers used to a 13"still broke af, and still using my MacBook Pro 2015
15" 2015 MBP is 36% heavier:
- 15" MBA: 3.3 lbs
- 15" MBP: 4.49 lbs
Yes, I agree— it doesn’t feel right (it’s way too soon) for Apple to upgrade MacBook Pros to OLED. And we would have heard more about it before now. They don’t need OLED to sell the M4 machines. 2026 is more likely.
That seems like a very strange complaint when any desktop Intel/AMD process combined with any AMD/NVIDIA GPU will heat up the whole house even more. This is primarily why I game on my Mac Studio, because the 13900k and 4090 setup just outputs too much heat.
That Macs can play games is a conspiracy theory spread by Russia's misinformation war for the express intent of getting you to spend more on Apple's GPU upgrade fees.
Don't fall for it.