Apple’s M series chips are too good for their own good

What a week, huh? Apple just had three straight days of announcements: First we got the new, colorful iMac, then the most powerful Mac mini ever, followed by the grand finale: the new MacBook Pro devices with Apple’s new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips inside.

All of these new machines sound great. Apple’s M4 chips are among the best — if not the best — PC chips you can buy when you account for power drain and performance. And yet, I’ve never been less compelled to upgrade.

I don’t even have a very recent laptop. My main workhorse is a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip inside, and my wife works on a 13.3-inch M1 MacBook Pro. Neither of us ever feel the need for a more powerful machine, simply because the M1 and M1 Max chips, respectively, are already incredibly powerful.

I got the M1 Max MacBook Pro on a whim. Last year, it was discounted so hard at a local retailer that I actually both emailed and called to make sure that the discount was real. I thought it had something to do with the fact that M1 Max is a pricy, pro-grade machine, and that very few buyers were actually willing to dish out the full asking price for something they don’t need.

It’s true: I don’t really have a use for 10 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores. I’m not a video graphics professional that runs complex projects in something like Blender. But the discount was there, and I got the M1 Max laptop because it cost less than the asking price of the M1 Pro just a few months earlier.

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And let’s face it, even the less powerful, M1 MacBook Pro is more than enough to handle my everyday tasks.

If you read Apple’s promo materials, you may have noticed that the company no longer compares its latest products with the last generation, but the one before that. In the case of M4, the company actually skipped two generations back, comparing the chip with the M1 (Apple says the M4 Max is up to 2.2x faster than the M1 Max, for example). But you get those results if you push 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 as my current laptop handles everything near-instantly.

I am some kind of computer professional, and I am also a huge computer nerd, and for these reasons alone, yes, I’d like to have the latest, most powerful MacBook Pro. But honestly, this desire has never been more subdued, as I just know that I literally would not be able to 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 don’t have a reason to upgrade every year or even every three years. But it does make you wonder whether there are other things the company could do to make these new computers a bit more desirable. The Space Black color only goes so far, and you could get the last generation in that color (albeit only with the 16-inch model). Thunderbolt 5, a slightly better battery life, and improved display are nice features, but are they nice enough to replace your old MacBook with a new one for a couple thousand dollars? The main selling point for these new MacBooks is the chip, and if that doesn’t convince potential buyers, these other improvements inside won’t cut it.

Perhaps more colors are the way, or perhaps a design change is in order. Maybe the company needs to do something radical, such as introduce the oft-rumored, but never-really-close-to-production foldable, all-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.