Apple's M4 chips are too good for their own good

What a week, huh? Apple just had three days in a row of announcements: first we got the colorful new iMac, then the most powerful Mac mini ever, followed by the big closing: the new MacBook Professional devices with the new M4 Professional and M4 Max chips from Apple inside.

All of these new machines sound great. Apple's M4 chips are among the best, if not he Best: PC chips you can buy with power consumption and performance in mind. And yet, I've never felt less compelled to update.

I don't even have a very recent laptop. My main workhorse is a 16-inch MacBook Professional with the M1 Max chip inside, and my wife works on a 13.3-inch M1 MacBook Professional. None of us feel the need for a more powerful machine, simply because the M1 and M1 Max chips, respectively, are already incredibly powerful.

I bought the MacBook Professional M1 Max on a whim. Last year, it was so discounted at a específico retailer that I emailed and called to make sure the discount was current. I thought it had something to do with the fact that the M1 Max is an expensive, professional-grade machine, and that very few buyers were actually willing to pay full retail price for something they don't need.

It's true: 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores really have no use for me. I'm not a video graphics professional running complex projects in something like Blender. But the discount was there and I bought the M1 Max laptop because it was less than the starting price of the M1 Professional just a few months earlier.

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And let's face it, even the least powerful M1 MacBook Professional is more than enough to perform my daily tasks.

If you read Apple's promotional materials, you may have noticed that the company no longer compares its latest products to the last generation, but to the previous one. In the case of the M4, the company went back two generations, comparing the chip to the M1 (Apple says the M4 Max is up to 2.2 times faster than the M1 Max, for example). But you get those results if you press that chip really hard. If you have 20 Chrome tabs open, a few social media apps running, and a game of Hearthstone running in the background… well, it may be faster on paper, but I don't really see how, since my current laptop handles everything almost instantly.

Am some kind I am a computer professional and I am also a huge computer nerd, and for these reasons alone, yes, I would like to have the latest and most powerful MacBook Professional. But honestly, this desire has never been more subdued, as I know I literally couldn't tell the difference between my three-year-old laptop and the new one.

It's hard to blame Apple for making chips so good that you have no reason to upgrade them every year or even every three years. But this makes one wonder if there are other things the company could do to make these new computers a little more desirable. The House Black shade only goes so far, and you could get the latest generation in that shade (although only with the 16-inch model). Thunderbolt 5, slightly better battery life, and an improved display are nice features, but are they good enough to replace your old MacBook with a new one for a couple thousand dollars? The main selling point of these new MacBooks is the chip, and if that doesn't convince potential buyers, these other internal improvements won't be enough.

Maybe more colors are the way, or maybe a design change is necessary. Maybe the company needs to do something radical, like introduce the oft-rumored but never close to production foldable full-screen MacBook. In any case, I need a better reason to want these new laptops than just the chip, because the chip has been way ahead of me for a while now.