Apple’s boring, awesome reason to buy the M4 MacBook Pro — and why I’m sold on it

There’s a new one MacBookPro in town, and Apple is touting some of the most promising features and specs I’ve seen from the company. Certainly, the Thunderbolt 5 port on the M4 Pro and M4 Max models will appeal to creatives and professionals who want faster, more powerful data transfers, and the maximum SDR brightness of 1,000 nits will satisfy any digital nomad. Still, I’m most attracted to a boringly awesome upgrade: battery life.

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With the new M4 MacBook Pro, Apple is advertising a battery life of up to 24 hours, a first for any Mac. Both the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 and the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max receive the full daily rating, while the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max falls just short with 22 hours.

Still, that’s a marginal upgrade compared to the previous M3 MacBook generation, which started with 18 hours of battery life. A few extra hours of use on the M4 variants can mean the difference between successfully uploading a video project and just missing a deadline. It also simply provides more endurance for everyday tasks, especially when you’re on the go and there’s no power outlet nearby. I could definitely take advantage of the extra juice when I work or fly at trade shows.

Apple attributes the battery improvements to its more efficient M4 processor, which delivers better performance per watt. Now that AI is embedded in more workflows, such as photo editing and encoding, “each chip contains greater memory bandwidth, so large language models and other large projects run smoothly and on-device,” Apple says in its press release.

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In addition to the battery capacity, the base M4 MacBook Pro also gets a subtle but practical charging feature: a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port on the right side of the laptop. This gives the device more flexibility, whether you charge it from a wall socket or connect it to an external monitor or accessory.

The new one M4 MacBook Pro models starting at $1,599, the same price as last year’s M3 series, making the new upgrades much easier to appreciate.